Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How confusing would it be to my son (5 years old) to start teaching him phonics at home he is being taught sight words at school? He tells me they are going over letter sounds, but I'm not sure if they are putting them together in sounds yet. He's in a Kindergarten/1st Grade combo class with 16 students, 1 teacher and 1 aide. Parent/teacher conferences will be within the next 2-3 weeks.
He gets very frustrated when he can't get the sight words he is sent home with and I wonder if I should start him on phonics at home.
When schools went to teaching "whole word" style as opposed to phonics, many parents taught their children phonics at home. I was in that generation, and the kids who only learned sight words or whole word are almost universally upset about it. None of the kids who were taught phonics at home (including my sister and me) has been upset about it, and it didn't seem to confuse anyone.
I homeschooled, so I taught all three of my kids to read. I found that a mixture of sight words and phonics worked better than either method alone, so I think you will be doing a good thing.
I started with phonics, and I still think it is very important for kids to learn to sound out words and to know the basic sound(s) of each letter.
However, sounding out words is slow and frustrating at first, and there are so many short, essential English words that do not follow simple phonetic rules (such as you, one, do, etc.). I made about 100 flash cards for these words and we worked on just recognizing them little by little.
I also made a few flash cards for words that each child *wanted* to know how to read. So for my older daughter those were words like fairy, princess, rainbow (I know, I know ). Then I could use those words to write sentences they were interested in, with some words they already knew and a few they would have to sound out.
After that we went straight to easy readers. It didn't take that long before it all "clicked." My second daughter was the slowest of the three to catch on, but by the end of first grade, she was a fluent reader too.
I think phonics is more damaging than helpful. At some point the student has to "unlearn" all of that phonics garbage and actually learn correct spelling. I refused to put my child through that nightmare, which resulted in an avid reader/writer with excellent reading comprehension and flawless spelling.
I was taught phonics by my mom, when the first grade teacher didn't use it. They put me in private school during first grade after mom was not satisfied by the method the public school used, look/see, and I went back to public school in 6th, but most of my friends could barely read and I sailed through books. They also *taught* spelling and puncuation. If I couldn't have read like I did it would have been a giant loss in my life. I was also taught proper use of language and we were expected to learn how to write a paper too. I love writing, and do it for fun. If I had to struggle with it, maybe I wouldn't have discovered that either.
My son lucked out that the school started a special reading program at that school when he went to kindergarten. They introduced the basic alphabet and sounds then. He went to a summer school to catch up. Then they used a phonics program and a writing/spelling approach along with it later. I was a room mom one year and it was amazing how some of the kids who couldn't read at all caught up in a year of intensive training. The philosophy was that if you can't read, you can't learn well since you don't have the tools. Reading and math were the basis and the other subjects were included in the emphasis.
It sure worked for him. In sixth grade he was reading Harry Potter all by himself. He only had to look up a few very British words. They tested him in eleventh grade and he was beyond 12th and into college level. He reads all the time now and loves books as gifts. If sure when he has kids it will matter very much to him that they learn to read.
My mom specifically put me in a school which used phonics and I even found it useful with I took German and could use the same method with different sounds.
If I was a parent today, my kids would be learning phonics if the school liked it or not.
I was taught phonics by my mom...They also *taught* spelling and puncuation...If I was a parent today, my kids would be learning phonics if the school liked it or not...If sure when he has kids...
I rest my case, "fonix" is useless.
Without "fonix," my child was reading at college level in the seventh grade.
Last edited by Dirt Grinder; 09-30-2015 at 12:50 AM..
I also homeschooled, and we did a combination of both. My kids spelled phonetically for a few years, then learned correct spelling as they became more voracious readers. It's really six of one, half dozen of the other. If you're an involved parent and there are no learning disabilities, then it all comes out in the wash anyway.
I think both are important. In my experience (admittedly, a sample of 1 -- my current 1st grader), there may be a developmental component to phonics-readiness. Despite knowing his letter sounds very well since preschool, my son struggled with (and was resistant to) blending and sounding out words in kindergarten. Although he fairly quickly learned basic sight words, reading unfamiliar words was a real struggle. With the start of first grade, suddenly something "clicked" with him with phonics, and his reading has taken off. Last year, he read a lot of Elephant and Piggie (wonderful, funny books with few words to a page, which he processed as sight words). So far this year, he prefers Dr. Seuss and other books that I think require basic phonics tools to read. Bob Books have been a major confidence booster as he has finally cracked the reading "code."
First, the person claiming that phonics is a useless way to learn because an earlier poster made a typographic error is, of course, not correct. Does Dirt Grinder really think that nightbird47 doesn't know how to spell the word punctuation? Is it more likely that she/he doesn't know how to spell the or or that she/he just skipped typing one of the letters?
Let's keep in mind that the word does have a "t" sound in it, so it would be pretty strange for someone's phonics training to lead one to drop that letter when writing the word. It seems more likely that it was a slip of the fingers. A rare one, too, since nightbird47's posts aren't really filled with typos.
Also, it's pretty silly to argue by anecdote about whose child reads at what level during what year. I didn't know people even received reading level tests in high school and middle school. Regardless, a kid doing well with one system doesn't make the other system bad. That's absurd.
There are just too many words for us to learn all of them by rote. English orthography is a little confusing at times, but most of the rules operate pretty well most of the time, and they're especially useful when dealing with words beyond the core vocabulary of the language. In fact, something like this is true in many languages. Irregularities tend to cluster around core speech, while rules get more rigid around the fringes, and they allow the language to be extended.
Phonics training is designed to get kids a solid foundation that will allow them to thrive even when they encounter the unfamiliar. In that way, it's a lot like the standard arithmetic algorithms learned in grade school. We don't use them that much once we've gotten past the training wheels stage reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic, but before that point, they point toward greatest mastery of the basic material, and they allow those who know them to be confident when encountering something new and difficult. The arithmetic algorithms allow any fifth grader to do virtually any computation asked of her. Any computation. That's actually pretty powerful. Phonics allows her to figure out new words without asking for help. That's powerful, too, as it makes it much easier for her to learn from books with unfamiliar words.
Think of the difference between learning Korean and learning Chinese. Korean has a very regular alphabet with 24 letters and only a few irregular spellings (which actually have their own rules that can be learned -- mostly they have to do with blending sounds and places of articulation). Chinese has thousands of characters that have to be memorized, though the basic vocabulary requires learning a few hundred characters for pronunciation and more for meaning.
Because of just these two traits, Chinese reading is considered fiendishly difficulty, even for native speakers of a Chinese dialect. Korean reading can be learned in less than a weak even by an unmotivated student. It was engineered that way by one of the great heroes of world literacy, King Sejong. He wanted the peasants to be able to read, not just the nobles, so he devised a writing system that made that possible for formerly illiterate farmers. Basically, he introduced phonics to Korea, and that was the start of a golden age that lasted for centuries.
My kids will have to learn phonics, because I'm going to teach them to read Vietnamese before they get to school. (I guarantee that no one in Vietnam would dare suggest any sort of non-phonics nonsense! That would be absurd, particularly when the writing system is the best way to learn the tones.) I'll make sure they learn a few other alphabets, too, so they can at least sound out words they encounter in Korean, Japanese, maybe Thai, and perhaps a few others. Maybe Chinese, if they're really dedicated. I want them to have tools they can use to teach themselves whatever they want to know. Our English letter system is important, too!
I have a few books designed to teach basic reading skills to Vietnamese children. The entire first book is dedicated to introducing the sounds made by each letter, with time to practice differentiating between the diacritical markings over the vowels, and even more time practicing the tones. (For those who don't know, Vietnamese is a tonal language. Each syllable has one of five tones, or six in the northern dialect, and tone is one of the word's lexical components. That is, a syllable that is otherwise the same but with a different tone becomes a completely different word.)
Now, I will say that kids in China learn to read pretty well even without anything resembling phonics. However, it's still harder, and it takes them longer.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
). Then I could use those words to write sentences they were interested in, with some words they already knew and a few they would have to sound out. 
