For those of you who have older kids who are transitioning from LR and flashcards and on to reading sentences and books, how much trouble do you have with your child “guessing” at words? What about kids who have been introduced to phonics? If your child reads and no longer “guesses” at words, how big of a problem do you think guessing was?
I don’t quite understand the enthusiasm for phonics to the exclusion of sight words, I have seen children read using phonics only and it is mostly a painful experience with very low comprehension (no offense to anyone here).
A lot of “phonics” words become sight words as the child learns to recognize them. The difference is they understand how it was “put together.” As adults we know most words we read by sight too
My kids guess starting with the right beginning sound, ha -ha They don’t read fluently yet (4.5 and almost 3 y.o.) but I am not pressured as long as we are enjoying the process (don’t let anything get painful )
It’s funny you brought this up as I was going to start a topic about it this very moment. My son is just at the age you are describing. He has a sight word vocabulary of 50+ words he reads straight away the second he sees a card, but he also is able to “sound out” many other words and is thus now reading short sentences. However, I have noticed that he has a tendency to guess words and was wondering what kind of ideas people had to help him move beyond that.
For instance he will will read “She can pat the cat” but when he gets to the word cat he will say can again (i.e. look at the beginning of the word and the guess before he gets to the end).
Anyway, the ideas I have thought of so far include making cards that say “mat” “man” “pat” “pan” “cat” can" etc… and then also corresponding pictures and trying to play a matching game of some sort just to reinforce that we have to look at the whole word. Any other ideas?
