Home education English: reading, phonics and writing

English at home splits into three jobs that are often confused with each other: learning to decode, learning to understand, and learning to produce. A child can be excellent at one and struggling badly with another, and treating them as one subject hides that.

Reading: use systematic phonics

The evidence here is unusually clear. Systematic synthetic phonics, taught explicitly and in order, beats the alternatives for most children and by a wide margin for children who find reading hard.

• Teach letter sounds before letter names.
• Teach blending explicitly, and practise it on words the child has been taught the sounds for.
• Use decodable books at first, so a child practises what they have learned rather than guessing.
• Do not teach guessing from pictures or first letters. It works at four and collapses at seven, and it is the hardest habit to undo.
• Keep going past the point schools usually stop, if your child needs it. Age is not a milestone.

When reading is late

The normal range is wider than most parents believe. Some children read at four and some at seven without either being a sign of anything. What matters is whether it is moving. While it is moving slowly, do not let the reading level cap everything else. Read aloud to them well above their own level, use audiobooks freely, and read the questions in other subjects for them. Comprehension and decoding are separate skills and there is no reason to hold a strong comprehender at the level of their weak decoding.

Comprehension, meanwhile, is a conversation rather than a worksheet. Most comprehension worksheets test whether a child can find a sentence and copy it out. Discussion tests whether they understood. Why did she do that, what do you think happens next, was he right to, how do you know. Five minutes of that after a chapter does more than a page of questions.

Writing: separate the two skills

Composing a piece and physically producing it are different, and for a lot of children the physical act consumes everything. Scribing, where they talk and you write, separates them and often reveals a child who had plenty to say and no way to get it out.

1. Get the ideas out first, by talking, scribing or voice, with no attention to spelling or neatness.
2. Shape it: order, paragraphs, what to cut.
3. Then, and only then, fix spelling and punctuation.
4. Mark one thing at a time. A page covered in red pen teaches that writing is failure and nothing else.

How Different Drums helps here

There is a Learn to Read phonics programme for the systematic work, a narrated story library, and a reading library, which covers the decode and the listen sides in one place. Worksheets and practice can be generated for spelling patterns, grammar, comprehension or writing structure at the child’s working level per subject, printable as PDFs with answers. English material is AI-generated rather than drawn from the hand-verified bank, which covers arithmetic, maths, calculus, chemistry and physics only, so it is worth a glance before use. Accessibility matters here more than in any other subject: dyslexia-friendly fonts, adjustable text size, colour themes, high contrast, and voice input so a child who cannot yet write can still compose and have it count. The tutor can discuss a book with a child at length, which is comprehension work that a worksheet cannot do.