My 2yo loves phonics, but refuses to sound out words. After much frustration, I pulled out a copy of Spaulding’s “The Writing Road to Reading” I bought a while back and looked through it. Lo and behold, it’s possible to adapt it for EL kids who can’t yet write! (Spaulding probably hates me.) I’m sharing this in case anyone else is in a similar situation.
You don’t actually need a copy of the book to follow this method; everything is available online. You’ll need to read carefully through this site: http://www.ontrackreading.com/homeschooling/the-ontrack-reading-homeschooling-program. He sells workbooks, but you don’t need them, and all the other info is here. He made quite a few improvements to the original WRTR, several of which I had done myself, and it saves buying the book! You’ll also need to google “Extended Ayres List” and teach the words on that list in that order.
The only other things you need are a marker, index cards (I recommend the multicolored set), and homemade refridgerator magnets. I bought a pack of three A4 sized magnet sheets that were supposed to go in a printer at Hobby Lobby for around $7. I just wrote the phonograms on the white side and cut them out.
The Spaulding Method is called “The Writing Road to Reading” for good reason. She advocates not teaching reading until after teaching children how to write each letter perfectly. But by using fridge magnets (which my kids, at least, love), we can start much earlier.
The first step is to learn the phonograms. Spaulding has 70; the On Track to Reading site has about 80, for reasons he explains. I wrote each one on an index card, with its sounds on the back if I had trouble remembering, and made up stories to help my daughter learn them. I’ll post my stories later; they’re pretty simple.
Once the first fifty phonograms are learned, Spaulding starts spelling words. We sit next to the fridge and I put out about ten phonograms (less right at first, more as she got the hang of it), some of which are in the word. I say the word and use it in a sentence. (“Go. We go to the store. Go.”) Sometimes I have to say each sound in the word seperately. (“gggg…oooo. What’s the first sound in ggg…ooo?”) We look for the phonogram that comes first. Spaulding emphasizes that if more than one phonogram could make the sound, you tell them which one to use; don’t talk about other possibilities in other words. (“Go starts with g. Good! Next we use the phonogram that says o, oh, oo.”)
Spaulding says that first graders should learn 30 words a week. I scaled that down a bit, although after several weeks, we’re almost doing that many. At first my daughter could do 3 at a time, a few times a day. We would introduce 3 new words in the morning, then review new and old words other times throughout the day. Now we’re up to 5 at a time. Occasionally we only review and don’t learn anything new.
After learning 86 words, Spaulding says to add another time each day for the child to write a sentence. Ask them to use one of their new words in a sentence. Teach capitalization and punctuation as it comes up. Teach them to ask for help with new words they haven’t learned that are part of their sentence. We will be starting this next week; I’ll post how it goes!
After 149 words, kids should start reading books! There is no reading instruction as such; just ask them to read. Help them with any words they struggle with, but they should be able to sound out new words just by virtue of all the spelling instruction. There’s a list of books on the On Track to Reading Website; they’re basically children’s classics like Robert McClosky, “Madeline,” Dr Seuss, etc. My daughter should get to this point in a few months. I’m excited! We’ll see how well it works then.
it has the teachers tick of approval :yes:
I am hopeless :yes: