Introduce the topic of phonics to children at an early age. By the time your children reach kindergarten they should understand that phonics make words and that letters represent sounds. Reading is like code-breaking and phonics is the means to decode the letters on the page and provide the child with an understanding of how sounds and written letters meld to form words. Phonics is the keystone to understanding how words work and are put together.
Even before correlating the letter with the word, teach the various sounds and draw them out so that the children understand the words as sounds. This is the first step towards decoding the way sounds work and how they relate to words on a page. After the children understand the variations in sounds that make up the words, you can introduce the children to letters, since after phonics, the ability to recognize letters is the next best predictor of reading and learning success. Research indicates that the earlier children grasp these basic principles of phonics and reading, the more success they will have in school.
Organize the sounds and letter-teaching logically. You need to impress on the children the relationship between letter-sounds, and then demonstrate these relationships by showing how the letters and the sounds make patterns to create words. The goal of phonics is to ease the child into reading fluently, while understanding the language and decoding unknown words. A logical progression starts by first teaching the combinations of phonics and letters in isolation followed by practicing using these combinations throughout the day, and finally introducing them into writing and reading exercises.
Promote activities, such as small reading groups, storytelling, alphabet-matching and other group activities that encourage identifying sounds with words. Make sure your children sound out words without stopping between sounds. When the word is sounded out, ask them to first read each sound without stopping and then to say the whole word in a smooth fashion. Finally teach the children to sound out the words silently in their heads before reading them aloud. Encouraging students to work together in small groups, creating stories, writing them down and correcting each others' use of phonetics is also an excellent way to promote the letter sound correspondence and to creatively incorporate phonics into their own story telling as well.