does anyone teach their little ones using phonics yet?
I’m wondering when to start teaching my 31month old blending. She now knows alot of her letter sounds from watching hooked on phonics. I noticed she makes attempts at sounding out words. Also when I give her random words she’s never seen and pronounce one of the words with emphasis on the 1st letter, she would pick the right word.
She learnt her sight words with pre-school prep and we’ve just gone back to ybcr, which by the way she seems to enjoy and learn much more than when we used it 18months ago.
Does anyone have experience with phonics for kids that age?
When teaching my first, I almost always did the sounding out–rarely asked him to do it. But I always asked him to blend the words together. So we would be looking at “cat” and I would say, “kk-aaa-tt … what is it?” and if he didn’t answer right away, I would say “k-a-t [faster]” and waited for an answer. Finally, if he had trouble blending a word, I would blend it very slowly and ask him to say it fast. As long as you break it down and be sensitive to what your child is capable of, and always make things just slightly challenging for him in terms of blending, pretty soon you shouldn’t have to do any sounding-out yourself. (At least, that was how it worked for us…)
In the past when I started teaching the under 3 crowd to read via phonics I started making sure that they had a solid foundation and could recall all the letter sounds.
Starfall.com is a great way to teach these. And there are many songs you can sing also. Youtube has a lot of phonics work. Many people like Leapfrog’s Letter Factory. And Preschool Prep is coming out with a Meet the Phonics late August 2011.
Then when it came to the actual decoding part I found that teaching in word families worked more effectively. I made flash cards with letters on them and flash cards with endings such as am, an, ap, at etc on them. I had the kids learn then most common 2 word endings first. Then I had them slide the starting consonant card and the ending card together.
c—at
c–at
c-at
cat
Then I would move on to hat, mat, bat etc. Eventually having the already decoded ending wasn’t necessary.The kids eventually were able to decode word in the traditional CVC way. c-a-t. I guess the way I started out was more like training wheels for phonics.
I have since become familiar with several phonics programs that do something similar to what I devised and some that teach it like this…
ca—t
ca–t
ca-t
cat
I do not believe that there is a one fits all solution. Just make sure to make it a game and keep it fun!
I garnered my word list from Samuel Blumenfeld’s How to Tutor book. He also has a book called Alphaphonics too.
I started blending with my DD at about 2.5 years. She knew all her letter sounds since 18 months. I did all the blending for her - as in said c-a-t cat and didn’t even ask her what it said at all though I did pause so if she knew she could say the word - it took a few months before she could tell me the word after I said the letters. When she was about 3.5 I started asking her what letters the word was made of so she would sound it out herself if she didn’t just read it correctly herself. Because we have done a lot of keywords she does have some trouble trying to sound out words that are not phonetical but I just tell her what it says then.
I made flashcard- type words for her with words ending with ‘at’. I made the ‘at’ in black, then the 1st letters in red i.e. Cat, Fat,mat etc. Hopefully she’ll eventually see the relationship, and figure out that the letters in black sound the same and changing the letters in red alters the word.
I’ve just tried recently the “hiding word” game with my 32 month old boy. I made some flash cards like “c a t” and hid the card in a half-folded paper (like cardboard). And then started to pull out the word slowly (it depends how quick he is). He like it. We even make a guessing game of it : Who do you thing is hiding in the tunnel/ mountain…So far it works for us.
It works well and you can teach both, the c-at or the c-ca-cat method. My son love something different all the time and was getting bored with me going over just the -at words or -an words etc. This gives us the opportunity to make about 150 CVC words (that make sense) and many others (just because…). It is easy to make- I got colored index cards from a teaching store (100 cards for $2), color coded them, punched holes and stuck them in a 3-ring binder. I did not even laminate the cards and they are holding up well.
The three columns i used are ’ blue (for the starting sound), pink (vowels) and yellow( ending sound). Seeing the cards this way is somehow helping him recognize the starting and ending sounds of the words (I just have to remind him ‘which is the sound on the blue card?’ etc)
I forgot to add- I have also put a blank card on each column so I can hide a letter in that column and practice ga-, ca-, ka-, la- etc or -an, -at, -ot.
Once we are done with the 3 letter words, I plan to make more cards with blends…
Really great ideas. Thanks a lot. And great site shaman. She’s really enjoying learning phonics and is getting the hang of it. We got lots of story books that have cvc words with a lot of the sight words she knows already knows so she’s having lots of fun at the moment!
