Phonics

I love teaching my children to read! It's just as much of a thrill as hearing them lisp their first words and watching them take their first steps. I'm so glad that I get to be the one to lead them onto the reading road that will take them into God's precious Word and onto so many other avenues of learning along life's way.

 One person who can explain how to teach little ones to read better than any I've heard is Ruth Beechick and she does so in her excellent little booklet entitled: "A Home Starts in Reading". Additionally, her book "A Biblical Home Education" has a wonderful chapter on teaching reading, which I highly recommend. Beyond that chapter...the entire book is the best I've read on Home Schooling. The general idea I gleaned from her is this:   that if you wait until the child is ready, teach them some of the sounds and let them read what they can right away rather than waiting until they've mastered each phonogram, they will gradually, on their own (with your help of course), put together a combination of phonetic and sight reading.

I have my children write the letters neatly on top of letters that I have lightly penciled in.  (I used to make dotted letters for them to trace but to save time have adopted this lightly penciled method). We start with the 2 o'clock letters : a,c,d,f,g,o,q and s.  And of course their name. And God, Dad and Mom...these are always favorites! While carefully tracing the letter, they must also repeat that letter's sound. This engages three  modes of learning all at once:  visual, auditory and kinetic...aka eye, ears and hands. By now they have learned enough sounds to start combining them into words...and they love that. Later I add the rest of the vowels, then the consonants, followed by the blends and digraphs. Typically at some point we will leave of teaching phonics because suddenly they just take off and know how to read!

I have plenty of phonics helps around but we keep going back to a little pack of phonics flashcards that we acquired somewhere along the way. What I like about these is that they have photos of everyday objects that the child can recognize, rather than cartoons or other whimsical drawings. We once had a set that featured "Magic" for the letter "m" and pictured a magician waving his black hat. Yuck! My kids can't even identify that when they're that little (thankfully!)

Peter and I were going through these flashcards today,  when we came to this one. All excited, he responded with "I know that one! It's IDOL! "He's never heard of a unicorn since there aren't any such creatures and immediately recognized it as an idol.  That thrilled my heart. I need to tape a photo of something else over that one.   Hmmm what starts with long u? Universe! That's it...I must find a small photo of the universe!

Yes, teaching children to read is an amazing, soul stirring, satisfying job. Seeing them take off, like Joseph has, with reading "Genesis" on his own is such a reward. Probably the most important virtue in a reading teacher is patience. If your little one is not understanding, he may not be ready for what you are trying to teach him. It might be that he needs a day or a month or several months before his is ready. In my experience, it's better to wait for them to bring things to me asking me, "what does this say?" than to push them ( I know...for I have pushed to the point of tears:( !) If they are not ready, just keep reading them wonderful stories, showing them what treasures await those who learn to read.