The primary thing to bear in mind when you teach phonics is that all children need to know the sound that each letter makes within each word. It is important that we don't add on the 'uh' sound of the vowel to the letter (e.g. saying 'suh' instead of 's'), as a lot of people, myself included, were told that the letters made these sounds when they were at school. We learned to read despite this, but learning only the sound makes it a lot easier to learn to blend letter sounds together to read words, and also identify sounds in words to write them.

Children learn in different ways but the three main ways are auditory (learning by hearing things), visually (by seeing things) and kinaesthetically (by relating learning to movement). Most commercial schemes for teaching phonics incorporate all three ways in order to help most children with their preferred learning style. Usually a picture with the letter which the children learn to recognise and link the letter to, a song including the sounds of the letter and a movement that is made whilst saying the sounds of the letters are used.

The second important thing is that at first it is less confusing for the child if you concentrate on only teaching the letter sound, and not its name (/a/ and not 'ay'). In this way they don't try to learn more than one thing at a time. Learning the letter names can come later when they have a good understanding of the letters and the sounds they make, by singing an alphabet song.

Thirdly, letters are usually taught first in the lowercase, not capitals. This is because in the majority of books and text the children will be reading, and for their writing, most of the letters are lowercase.

Free resources are available on many sites to help to teach phonics though it can take a lot of surfing to get a full range of activities for all of the letter sounds. For those of you with lots of free time, it is worth looking around.

Different schemes suggest that rates of learning will differ. The UK government in its 'Letters and Sounds' document suggest learning about 4 letters or phonemes each week, starting at about age 5. In my school we do one letter sound per week as most children are learning English as non native speakers and must concentrate on the building of understanding and vocabulary.

Really, it isn't too important whether your child learns the letter sounds quickly or slowly. Some children will be able to learn 4 a week or more, and others will struggle to learn 1 a week. You shouldn't be unduly worried by this and it is certainly not an indication of what their future performance in school will be. When they are ready, they will eventually learn all the letter sounds sooner or later and start to read and write. Having helped to teach your child to read is an achievement that in the end you can be proud of.