Parents thank mum for 'amazing' hack to teach children how to pronounce words

15 December 2023 , 10:30

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The phonics hack has been hailed by parents online (stock photo) (Image: Getty Images)

Teaching the little ones how to correctly pronounce their words can be a challenge.

Most schools in the UK use phonics to introduce children to reading and spelling. This is done by breaking down words and focusing on the sounds each individual letter makes.

The next stage explores how common pairs of letters (sometimes referred to as best friends) often make a certain sound when put together. For example 'ph' makes an 'f' noise.

But some spellings in the English language really don't make much sense, filled with silent consonants and unnecessary vowels that sometimes even trip adults up. However, one woman has found a genius solution to help her child pronounce words correctly.

TikTok user @Readingroots runs an account on teaching phonics to parents. In a recent video she explained how she would teach children how to say words with 'eigh' sounds - such as sleigh and freight.

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"This word is tricky," the mum says to her daughter, using the word 'sleigh' as her example. "You know a trigraph has three letter? Well, this word has a quadraph. Four letters; one sound. So 'eigh' makes an 'a' sound."

The daughter then blends the word together, slowly pronouncing s-l-eigh, before repeating the word faster. The linguist uses 'graphs' which follows the same principle as 'best friends'.

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So, a digraph is two letters that make one sound when put together (like sh). Trigraphs are three letter combinations that produce one sound, such as 'igh' - and quadraphs take four letters that together make a single sound - such as 'eigh'.

Parents flocked to the comments section to rave about the tip, one with one user writing: "This is really helpful!" while another added: "I think you are amazing. You're helping me so much with my four-year-old."

However, there are always certain exceptions to this rule - as the user says: "Nothing is ever simple in English." For example, the combination of 'eigh' in the word 'height' is pronounced as 'i' rather than 'a'.

What's your top phonics hack? Let us know in the comments section below

Liam Gilliver