Our Grade 2 students have been hard at work building important early reading skills. They’ve been practicing phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in words, like breaking the word cat into /k/ /a/ /t/. This helps them understand how letters represent sounds.

They’ve also been learning phonics, which teaches how letters and groups of letters match the sounds we say. For example, the letter b makes the /b/ sound, and sh makes the /sh/ sound like in shoe. Phonics helps students sound out words when reading and spell them more easily when writing.

In the video below, you’ll see examples of both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in action in our Grade 2 classrooms.

Sincerely,

Angela McPhee

Principal