karma to you domanmom
i think you explained it beautifully
Tanikit if i remember correctly you don’t teach the words like “and, the, but, a” with flash cards
you wait till you start phrases and sentences and just add them in
it’s to hard to explain what “the” means by itself but in a sentence it’s really easy to understand why we need it
we can teach babies to read before they can talk
so we can also teach them to read sentences before they can say them
and for older kids reading sentences will help them to start using them early
and correctly by the way
Hi, some very interesting comments. I Would like to share my experience of teaching my three children to read and on their ability to spell. I followed the GD method and they acquired a large sight vocabulary which resulted in my children intuiting the rules and reading early with impressive fluency. I avoided teaching phonics with my first two children until after they started school and they both experienced some difficulty in learning to spell. They eventually overcame these difficulties which i believe were a result of their ability to sight read without having to consciously examine each word. My son was shown sights words almost from birth and could demonstrate an ability to read at 10 months. After he had acquired a sight vocabulary of around 2000 words, i decided to introduce an element of phonics and introduced games like finding words within words. These additional activities gave him a deeper understanding of word construction and enabled him to spell extremely well. He never had to practice any of his school spelling lists and at around 7 years was tested by the school-it was determined that his spelling age was twice his chronological age.
Hope this was of some interest.
I only used an element of phonics rather than a program and it was only introduced to teach spelling rather than reading. I very quickly went through the phonemes and went on to spelling words with sandpaper letters. Sandpaper letters to teach the letter shapes for writing. Examples of words taught- bad bat sat mat rat etc. My son was already a fluent reader and phonics played no part in teaching him to read. I had previously made the incorrect assumption that a fluent reader would automatically be a good speller. I only spent a few weeks encouraging my son to look at word structure and later went on to finding words within words. Sam enjoyed finding words within words and this was something that we did on a regular basis. If we were down town and i saw a good example i would draw this to his attention.
I fully agree with all of your earlier comments, Regards Chris.
Chris that is the first time I have heard anyone talk about finding words in words as a means to spelling, but it may explain some of my own early education as we played a game in our grade 1 classroom where we found words in words (a little like Boggle I suppose) - I have never had a problem with spelling but thought it was because I also learnt to sight read before school. Maybe there is more to it than I imagined.
I believe that there should be no argument over phonics vs whole words - rather both should be used - if the child learns phonics while learning whole words, then great (he/she still has both) and if a child learns to read words while doing phonics that is fine too. Obviously to start a baby you cannot begin with phonics as they have no understanding of an -ai or a -tion etc Babies are interested in meanings. You could teach a baby hieroglyphics (thats a word I’m not sure how to spell) and as long as it had meaning for them they’d be happy learning it.
that is a very cool way of teaching phonics
my big problem with phonics is that kids find it boring
but play games with words seems like a fun unschooling way of learning phonics
karma to you chris
i use the flash cards method at first for phonics. its interesting for her. i started Arabic too. she is reading Arabic “DHALU” as English “C”. now she knows most of the letters as i started show alphabetic songs and very recently we stated using magnetic letters. very helpful. e likes the letter “x” and “s”
Before my daughter went into kindergarten we started teh hooked on phonics program i had purchased. it was a pre k set that taught letters and there sounds. she did great with it…
but now that she is learning to read words they are actualy teaching them both methods. She brings home these paper books they make in class.
Each page is the same sentece expect the noun is changed. She had realized that she can look at the picture and figure out what the new word is. They have a list called “the sight words” of what they should know and they learn them threw these books. I like the idea of the little readers sight words program but i dont think that the way her school is teaching her in these books is very good.
If you send your kids to school they’ll most likely be taught phonics, so teach them to read the sight way beforehand. Or else reading will be a chore and a bore, like this new phonics method at my kids school. My son was introduced to it at grade 3, after a few years earlier using letterland. I asked him what he thought, and he just groaned. Teaching them about phonemes and graphemes really takes the joy out of it.
Sorry, but I disagree. First of all, in U.S. schools, the whole language method still dominates (this is why your son didn’t start learning phonics, it seems, until age 8, when he should have started at age 5 (or earlier). Anyway, most kids are taught phonics badly, incompletely, and ineffectively. For the most part, trying to make kids memorize whole words dominates. Second, while many kids can learn in either way, it is the whole word method, not phonics, that has been proven in scientific study after study to fail many kids, while systematic, intensive phonics works pretty much whenever it is tried. Relying on the whole word method has been an important cause of the remedial reading problems in U.S. schools; this is the consensus conclusion of psychologists and reading experts outside of educationist circles. Third, there is no actual evidence that a sound program of systematic phonics will make reading “a chore and a bore.” In fact, the opposite is more often true. Consider the old “Dick and Jane” readers. I remember the old whole word Holt readers we used in elementary school–how boring. Lots of phonics-educated kids love reading, of course. Any method that so effectively unlocks the secrets of the written code will make lots of kids love to read.
Nikita, I think that you are associating phonics training with boring worksheets based on your son’s experience. Well, boring worksheets are not the only way to learn phonics. There are bad methods of learning every subject, but you don’t discard the subject (phonics) because there are bad methods of learning them. You can learn phonics systematically using almost exactly the same method that Doman recommends. See http://www.mediafire.com/Fleschcards for how.
The new system he is learning, in AUSTRALIA, after using Letterland which I think has phonics in it, is THRASS. We parents were given a demonstration of how it worked, by pretending we were 5 year olds in class getting a lesson. It wasnt fun. I decided I definitely had to home school the younger ones at that point. I was never taught graphemes and phonemes as a kid and I’m a great reader and spell well (spelling errors are typos, I seem to have dyslexic fingers!).
Being a grandmother, I did the Dick & Jane books (trying not to say how old I am :)).
I went to a private school and had saved copies of these old books. My daughter was being taught by phonics in kindergarten by a very good teacher. She was having difficulty but it was working for some kids in the class. I took an afternoon off work and we read the old Dick & Jane books. She started reading immediately!
A friend of mine at work had same problem but her son was in first grade and still struggling. I took her my Dick & Jane books. Guess what he stated reading immediately!
I think the new methods of teaching reading are the problem. I think they should return to the Dick & Jane books that worked so well for years. I was taught phonics also in second grade after I had the confidence to read sight words in the Dick & Jane books. Children need to be taught sight words because sounding out every little word is extremely frustrating to a new reader. I think the scientific studies return the answer that the researchers want it to return. Just like the government studies return the answer that either side would prefer.
These are two personal examples I have that your method alone does not work Daddude for all children.
I am using sight reading plus A Beka phonics cards (from 4-5 y.o.). They teach pronunciation of 135 “special sounds” letter combinations after the alphabet sounds and short/long vowels.
I think for right brain dominant person (like myself )sight spelling works best esp. if you read a lot. On the other hand, left brain dominant people do well with rules and phonics. I think by exposing the kids to both and trying to see what works well for them in the long run, we are helping them to do well.
By Doman all babies are right brain dominant so it makes sense to start with sight reading first whole words and then flash alphabet/special sounds.
I downloaded all your Fleschcards and printed it. HOw many words each day do you show it to your son?
For how long is he able to read? And how do you present it?
The first several months (from ages 22 mos to 28 mos or so) we showed cards (a set of 8-12) once or twice a day, I think. The last few months, though, he’s pretty much learned how to read and has less patience for cards, so we look at them only a few times a week. But we’re still making new cards and showing them to him, and intend to do so until we’ve gone through all the rules.
THanks Daddude for your files on mediafire. I downloaded a few but haven’t started on those yet. The other files u have here are great too! Yesterday we looked at money and today space ppt. My son’s classmate’s dad works in NASA and he gave a presentation last week in the school and so my son has been talking about space shuttles and astronauts ever since. SO he was very interested in looking at those space files. THanks again!
and karma for u!
Well, first of all, it isn’t my method; phonics was the only method of teaching reading to kids in English and other European languages until the late 19th century/early 20th century. What you think is “the good old-fashioned way” was in fact an innovation in your own grandparents’ time.
As to how your granddaughter learned to read, you don’t really say enough. I doubt that it is possible for Dick and Jane to teach any child to learn to read in one afternoon – surely that’s not what you’re saying. If you had a role to play I’m sure it was as much the fact that you are her grandma as anything else. I’m not denying that whole language can work, especially with an enthusiastic teacher. Probably, when you sat down to read with your granddaughter, it did help to work with a text that wasn’t too hard, and probably what happened is that your granddaughter’s classwork prepared her to read Dick and Jane, and then she applied what she had learned. Right? But that doesn’t show that phonics failed your granddaughter. Actually I don’t know what kind of phonics your granddaughter was learning. It might not have deserved the name, you know. Not every program calling itself “phonics,” or every lame, half-hearted attempt to introduce phonics into an otherwise whole language program (what is often called a “hybrid” approach), will produce results. The only sort of phonics that deserves the name is systematic, intensive, or synthetic phonics (many names have been given to distinguish it from “mixed” programs).
No disrespect to you, but I think the whole word, Dick-and-Jane method did not work so well for so many years. It failed a lot of kids who would not have been failed by a proper, intensive phonics program. You might have fond memories of those books, but for many other children they represented nothing but boredom and frustration. Don’t tell me you don’t remember that, too, even if you didn’t share the opinion – the whole Dr. Seuss and easy-reader phenomenon came about in reaction to the boring Dick-and-Jane readers. Dick and Jane was a little before my time, but my mom had me go through a phonics workbook (I remember it) when I was 5 or 6, I guess, and I went on in school to use lame whole word Holt readers–incredibly boring.
Just look at the California experiment with whole language. They mandated use of whole language as a state law back in 1987, and subsequently California dropped to last place (in one year’s rankings). I gather that the scores subsequently rose after the law was repealed. Later–to quote Wikipedia (and this coheres with what I’ve read elsewhere): “The National Reading Panel examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction was published in 2000 and provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S. The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.”
For all but the education establishment, the scientific debate is essentially over – even if the policy debate rages on.
My advocacy of explicit phonics is not out of some blind prejudice. I go where scientific studies lead. Studies that follow the scientific method properly uniformly demonstrate the significant superior effectiveness of explicit phonics, versus programs that don’t use explicit phonics. For me, it’s not a question of phonics vs. whole word–it’s a question of explicit phonics versus anything else (regardless of whether it is called “phonics” or not). Again, over a period of many decades, the proper scientific studies have actually proven the superiority of explicit phonics versus the other (“see-and-say,” whole word, whole language, “implicit” phonics, and “mixed”) methods.
Many kids can learn to read from a whole language method, and maybe matters are different for little babies. But that’s probably because they manage to figure out the code. (It’s also plausible to me that it’s easier and more natural for very little kids to be able to figure it out. But as far as I know, nobody has done studies on that.) But, especially for older kids, if you really want a kid to know the code, you teach the code, period. Otherwise, you’re taking your chances.
There’s one other thing, while I’m still on my soapbox (again)…sometimes educationist ideologues try to portray a debate between intensive phonics, on the one hand, and people who want to “introduce literature” to children. This is an insulting false alternative. I am as big an advocate of the use of literature for children as you’ll ever encounter. And I’ve been teaching my boy using phonics. There’s no reason you can’t do both, and I doubt there’s a single phonics advocate who says you shouldn’t.
