(1) The Doman method, in which words are presented in conceptual groupings (e.g., things found in the house, musical instruments, farm animals).
(2) Something similar to the Doman method, except that the words are presented in phonetic groupings (with the first group including “short A” CVC words like cat, bat, bag, hag, ham, Sam).
If you use method (2), you’re doing something very much like what Doman recommends, but you’re making it much easier for the child to infer the rules.
Yes, exactly. I didn’t go as far as to make it quite that simple but I did often introduce similar words or point out similar words. Bee & Knee spring to mind. Makes sense to give an earlier chance of making the connection.
I started his thread a long while back but have only just read some of the later replies. How have my own feelings changed on the phonics issue?
I do not believe that in English where the language is made up of 5 different languages and where words are regualrly “stolen/borrowed” from other languages that either approach alone will work unless we decide to teach our children a good many languages before teaching reading.
When we teach children to speak we teach them using the whole word approach - no one says “ba, ba ba” to a baby to teach them to speak - we just say words and they figure it out. So that by the time a baby is saying its first words even if incorrectly it is saying something that MEANS something. Since reading is about deriving meaning from text, it follows that whole words are what give meaning “c” means nothing and nor does “a” or “t” but CAT means something.
And this is why I prefer to start with a whole word/s and then teach the phonics from the few words my child already knows and then to extend it to words she does not know. My other reason for this is that I have bought two books that show how to teach more explicit phonics - The ordinary parents guide to teaching reading and Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. Both are great books and I have got a lot out of them that has helped me, BUT the phonics stories that accompany the lessons are very often rubbish - they have little meaning for my child and the words are put on the page to follow rules rather than to tell a story.
This is not what reading is about for me- I want a story or instruction or something that means something - I don’t want it to be about lists of words or see how clever someone can be to make a story with a certain phonics rule. My daughter will not read phonics teaching books even though she can - she wants books with proper sentences that have meaning and for that I had to teach whole words and then when I come across new words I teach them to her with phonics.
Yes I may do explicit phonics eventually - there are rules that are hard to teach just by finding words in context and she may need more practice, but for now she can do first grade phonics despite minimal teaching and she can sight read a huge amount of words (mstly dolch words) so she is prettyset for reading basic books and I hope to have her up to a second grade level soon if she is up to it. But mostly I want her to enjoy the whole process.
