- The child has learned the sounds of individual letters through phonics activities.
- They can identify and pronounce consonant sounds (e.g., /b/, /c/, /d/).
- They can recognize and pronounce vowel sounds (e.g., /a/, /e/, /i/).
- The child has developed the ability to blend letter sounds to form words.
- They can segment words into individual sounds (e.g., cat -> /k/-/a/-/t/).
- They have learned to read simple words with phonetic spelling (e.g., cat, dog, hat).
- The child can distinguish between different letter sounds to select the correct one in a word.
- They have practiced phoneme substitution by replacing one sound with another to create new words (e.g., changing "mat" to "pat").
- The child has worked on identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words.
- They have learned to recognize common digraphs (e.g., /ch/, /sh/, /th/).
Continued development can be fostered by introducing more complex phonics patterns, such as consonant blends (e.g., /bl/, /st/, /gr/), vowel digraphs (e.g., /oa/, /ee/, /ie/), and r-controlled vowels (e.g., /ar/, /or/, /er/). Encourage the child to practice their phonics skills through various activities like word hunts, playing word-building games, and reading phonics-based books.