Primary and early years
School reports are full of phonics jargon that assumes training most parents never had. This guide translates the terms and shows what good early reading teaching looks like.
Phonics is the teaching of how letters and letter groups map to the sounds of English, so children can work out words they have never seen. Taught well, it is systematic (sounds introduced in a planned order), explicit (the mapping is taught, not discovered by luck) and brief but frequent. Most children learn to decode this way; some need more of it, more slowly, than the classroom pace allows.
This guide is for parents of children aged 3 to 7 who are meeting phonics terminology in school reports and parent meetings. It translates the jargon, shows what good teaching looks like, and lists the signs that a child needs more support. It takes about five minutes to read.
English is not a reliably phonetic language, but it is far more decodable than it appears: most words can be worked out from letter-sound patterns, and children who learn the patterns early read new words independently instead of memorising every word by sight. That independence is what phonics teaching is for.
A typical phonics lesson is short and brisk: a review of known sounds, one new sound or spelling pattern, practice blending it into words, and reading or writing a few sentences that use it. Ten to twenty minutes, most days, in the early years. The repetitiveness is the design, not a failure of imagination.
The glossary below covers the terms Bali parents meet in school reports. None of them is complicated once translated.
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in a word: “ship” has three phonemes, sh-i-p |
| Grapheme | The written letter or letter group that spells a sound: “sh” is one grapheme for one phoneme |
| Blending | Pushing sounds together to read a word: c-a-t becomes “cat” |
| Segmenting | Pulling a word apart into sounds to spell it: “dog” becomes d-o-g |
| Digraph | Two letters spelling one sound, as in “sh” or “th” |
| Tricky words | Common words that do not follow the patterns taught so far, learned largely by sight |
| Decodable books | Early reading books written using only the patterns the child has already been taught |
“Systematic” is the other word worth unpacking. It means the school teaches sounds in a deliberate sequence, each building on the last, rather than as they happen to arise in storybooks. When a report says your child is “working within Phase 3” or similar, it is naming a place in that sequence; ask the teacher what the sequence is and where the phases end.
Parents who learned to read in Bahasa Indonesia sometimes wonder why English reading takes years of explicit teaching when Indonesian reading arrives so quickly. The reason is the writing system: Indonesian spells sounds almost perfectly consistently, so once a child knows the letters, they can read nearly anything. English maps roughly 44 sounds onto 26 letters with centuries of historical spelling layered on top, which is why “though”, “through” and “cough” share letters but not sounds.
This is also why guessing from context, the strategy many adults remember, fails new readers in English. The word cannot be guessed reliably because the spelling is not reliable. Systematic phonics is the workaround: it teaches the patterns that do hold, in an order that covers most words early.
Most international schools in Bali teach early reading through a systematic phonics programme in the early years, alongside story time, talk and shared reading. Programmes differ in sequence and materials, but the structure above is common to all of them, so the specifics of your child’s school matter less than whether the teaching is systematic and the books are decodable.
Two questions at a parent meeting tell you what you need: which phonics programme does the school follow, and which sounds has my child secured so far? The second answer is the one you can act on at home.
If the school uses different terminology from the glossary above, do not worry: programmes name their phases differently, but the underlying skill sequence, hear the sounds, map them to letters, blend to read, segment to spell, is shared across all of them. Ask the teacher to translate the report into secured sounds, and the jargon stops mattering.
Where a child needs more than the classroom pace, one-to-one support follows the same logic as a good phonics lesson, slowed down and tailored: a short review of sounds already secured, one new pattern introduced with the child’s own hands on the letters, blending practice with decodable words, and a game or two so the session ends warmly. Sessions for this age are short, typically 30 to 45 minutes, because young attention is the binding constraint.
Progress is measured against the sequence, not against classmates: which sounds are secure this month that were not last month. That framing matters for the child as much as the parent. A six-year-old who believes they are “bad at reading” needs visible proof they are moving, and a secured-sound list provides it.
Most children keep pace with classroom phonics. The signs that yours may need more: blending that stays effortful long after classmates’ has become smooth, sounds taught and then lost by the following week, guesses from pictures rather than the letters, and growing distress or avoidance around reading. Any of these, sustained, is worth raising with the teacher first.
A small number of children need teaching that is slower, more structured and more repetitive than any classroom can offer, and persistent difficulty with reading and spelling can point toward dyslexia. That question belongs to the school’s learning support coordinator and, where assessment is warranted, to a qualified educational psychologist. We are tutors, not clinicians: we do not diagnose. What we can do is provide patient, structured one-to-one teaching at your child’s pace, and our early years and reading pages describe how that works.
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