A good phonics program will include assessing the student to see where the gaps are in both phonics knowledge and phonemic awareness.  

A phonics program will progress through phonics skills starting with the simplest skills (and the most high utility).  Lessons should include not just drills of letter-sound correspondences, but should include phonemic awareness activities too. 

Phonemic Awareness activities are the practical application of phonics knowledge.  Phonemic Awareness includes blending sounds together to decode a word, segmenting sounds to write a word, or moving sounds around.  For example, you may have your child make the word "mat" with letter tiles.  When you ask your child to "change the /a/ to /i/; now what word do you have?" you are doing phonemic awareness with phonics.  Although, technically phonemic awareness can be done orally (without letters), research tells us it is most effective when combined with phonics.  

It's important to continue to introduce new phonics skills once the child is ready. However, continuously reviewing previously mastered skills is very important for students who struggle with reading.  Without frequent review, you'll likely find that a skill that was previously mastered has been forgotten. 

Include daily reading of books or reading passages to give your child opportunities to practice their decoding skills, become a more fluent reader, work on comprehending (or making meaning), and to promote orthographic mapping of High Frequency Words.  

Try to find books that will allow your child to practice the phonics skills they are working on mastering.  However, if your child has to "sound out" most words labouriously, it's likely the book is too hard.  A "good fit" book will have plenty of words that your child knows and can read on "sight" and some words they can "sound out" with their taught phonics skills.  It is often challenging to find the perfect fit and there will be some words your child can't read with the phonics skills they have learned.  I've written about how to  help your child with this here. 

Children will benefit from explicit pre-teaching of new vocabulary they may encounter when reading.  You can do this by: 

• introducing the word to your child and explaining the meaning,

• use the word in a few sentences,

• point out the word and it's meaning when you encounter it in text,

• incorporate the word into your language over the next few days or weeks so it isn't forgotten. 

Morphology is the study of the smallest unit of meaning in language.  Morphemes include prefixes, suffixes, and bases.  Teaching your child some common prefixes and suffixes will help with both decoding words and comprehension of words.  Start with common affixes such as: 

Affixes that don't change meaning: 

• -ing

• -ed

Affixes that change meaning: 

• re-

• un-

• -ful

• -able

• -ion (both -tion and -sion are pronounced "shun"