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tovlo4801
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| Posted: April 28 2005 at 10:18am | IP Logged
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I'm looking for input on how to proceed with teaching reading to my 5 yo.
I admit that I got The Writing Road to Reading from the library earlier this year and was just flat overwhelmed! My son has been picking up reading pretty quickly, so I decided not to stress out about trying to implement this program or spending tons of money on Sound Beginnings. I don't need the writing component to these programs because I'm using HWOT anyway.
We started teaching reading last year with 100 EZ lessons and went 1/2 way through. My son picked up on that really well. Then this winter we discovered www.starfall.com and played with that for a while. Now we're just going through the Bob books mostly. We do a new book every day and he just reads them. There's hardly any prompting or guidance needed by me.
My big concern is that he won't really understand the phonics rules. I've read that even kids who pick up on reading pretty quickly should still be given a good phonics base. So I've been trying to decide how to do that. Since he's picking up on reading so quickly I don't want to do anything more involved or expensive than necessary. I had looked at Phonics Pathways, but then decided to just to do the Explode the Code workbooks. I thought that he could get his phonics grounding by doing workbooks quietly, mostly on his own, while I work with his brother. Then I saw someone mention using The Ordinary Parent's guide to Teaching Reading in another post today. I'd never heard of this book, but I looked it up and it looks pretty good. Now I'm questioning my plan again. Do you think it would be worthwhile to get something like The Ordinary Parent's Guide for a good grounding in phonics or do you think reading books (like the Bob books) in increasing difficulty and the Explode the Code workbooks will be enough? I do want to make sure he has good phonics understanding because I understand this will make a difference when it comes to spelling.
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Leonie
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| Posted: April 30 2005 at 12:21am | IP Logged
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My experience has been that my children don't always need to know ALL the phonics rules.
As Ruth Beechick says, many of us can read and spell without knowing all the rules. After the basics, a number of phonics rules, for a number of people, are picked up by example and osmosis.
With each of my sons, we progressed about halfway through a phonics/reading programme ( home made or purchased, depending on the child and my time!) - and then they started reading. We then read aloud every day - simple books. I read and the child read. Consistency in reading time seemed to matter more than knowing all the rules. We did copywork and sentence writing and drawing.
And they just took off with reading. writing and spelling - each in their own time.
So, we never finished a phonics programme or learned a myriad of phonics or spelling rules. Yet, they have all learned to read and to decode new words and to spell
( younger ones, are still absorbing spelling).
I know that each family and child is different but thought I'd share our experience so far.
leonie in Sydney
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saintanneshs
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| Posted: May 26 2005 at 3:46pm | IP Logged
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Dear Richelle,
I'm not a "seasoned" home school mom (I have one child finishing up his "kindergarten" year and one we just began preschool with) but I too have felt like I wasn't sure about how to approach the phonics lessons. Here's what I came up with:
When I taught Kindergarten and first grade in public school, we had no workbooks (no funds for such) and other than a letter of the week type of curriculum for K and sound of the week for grade 1, the teachers just read, read, read! When I first started attending the home school conferences I was overwhelmed with the amount of workbook-based phonics programs. Even though I had never had any problems teaching phonics and reading to my students, I thought (as a new home school mom) that maybe I'd better re-think my approach and find something more step-by-step and "by the book" to make sure I didn't miss anything important. I felt really conflicted and unfit to use my old approach, what with all of the extensive programs (expensive too, I might add). I decided to just pick one and stick with it. To make a long story short, I began boring both myself and my son with all of these busy beginning phonics lessons, which had no application to what we were learning or interested in and we both hated it. So I began my search for alternatives. Since I'm not comfortable waiting to begin teaching independent writing until the later years, I thought about how I could do this now. I thought about how writing has always been one of my strengths (geography and math are NOT!)and how my sister, who was educated in the same school with the same teachers and was raised by the same mother (who was perpetually correcting our grammar and spelling, by the way) had such trouble with the most basic writing rules. Since she teaches now too and has had tremendous success despite her issues, I called her and asked her what made her become a better writer. She said that she struggled through school with spelling and grammar, but when she went to college and grad. school and then became a teacher, she knew that she'd better not be sending home any flawed letters to her students' parents. She said that when she wrote something that mattered to her, she paid special attention to spell-check errors and grammatical mistakes and gradually began learning from them. Apparently the "phonics by the book" approach didn't stay with her because she didn't apply the lessons to any writing that she wasn't connected to.
About two months ago, I decided that the phonics "by the book" programs were great when used as resources (which is how we used a scope and sequence in the public school), but (for us) would lead to ultimate dislike of anything writing-related should we try to just get the day's phonics lesson done and never take the time to enjoy reading and writing.
Now I've decided that knowing all of the phonics rules isn't as important as having a good resource to find them when you need them. My mother, who is an amazing elementary school teacher, is always saying we should grab the "teachable moment," teach rules and such as they apply to whatever the child is reading or writing and never "wait" to introduce something until a phonics book brings it up. I know that CM doesn't advocate writing until much later, but when we read our read-aloud together, I have my son narrate back to me and then he tells me what he would like to draw to go with his narration. Today we read Apple Farmer Annie for our farm unit and he wanted to draw his favorite apple food to go with his narration. Above his narration he wrote apL saLDu (apple salad) and drew his picture. After much praise for all of the sounds he heard in his two words, I wrote the right words "apple salad" above his words (no big deal, just so he can see how it looks). We glued an "ap" word family list to his page (away from his beautiful narration and writing attempts) and went over the words together. Now he is creating his own resource in a writing journal context for the next time he needs an "ap" word and can't remember how to write it. Less than 30 minutes total for reading together, narrating, writing together and phonics lesson and best of all, he was happy to do it because it was "his" and he was so excited to share what he'd learned with his daddy at lunch. I feel good because I'm not trying to fit his reading and writing around a phonics lesson, but am finding a phonics lesson to fit what my son has a made a reading and writing connection with. Tomorrow we will go over the "ap" word family list, along with a few others we've done like "ow" (for the plow he drew the other day) and "at" (for a cat). So for me, I think I've decided on a way to teach phonics in the context of reading, speaking and writing (which was how I used to do it in the first place and loved it), and I have my confidence back. The best thing about this is that I can do this method all of the way through high school if I want to. I'm still going to buy a phonics resource when we need them, but english.donnayoung.org has great info. for everything from spelling to the rules of grammar, and there are lots of other sites that can help with this, so maybe I can keep my wallet in check for a few more years.
I know my kids are a lot younger than yours, but I love to hear how other moms teach (I'm on the hunt for some hands-on math activities now) and sometimes just hearing how they do it helps me feel more confident in my own ability to do this too!
Good Luck! 
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Kristine
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Marybeth
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| Posted: May 26 2005 at 5:51pm | IP Logged
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I plan to use The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. The program lay out appealed to me over 100 EZ lessons.
I agree with Ruth Beechick, b/c I myself, do not know all the phonics rules. 
I plan to teach what I can and then hopefully my ds will have all the skills he needs to decode and read things which interest him. I never was a strong reader (even though I was taught intensive phonics) until I just read, read, read, read the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade. I take my grandfather's advice and read something worthwhile everyday with a dictionary by my side to look up definitions and/or pronunciations of new words. This system has yet to fail me.
God bless,
Marybeth
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tovlo4801
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| Posted: May 28 2005 at 6:17pm | IP Logged
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saintanneshs wrote:
Today we read Apple Farmer Annie for our farm unit and he wanted to draw his favorite apple food to go with his narration. Above his narration he wrote apL saLDu (apple salad) and drew his picture. After much praise for all of the sounds he heard in his two words, I wrote the right words "apple salad" above his words (no big deal, just so he can see how it looks). We glued an "ap" word family list to his page (away from his beautiful narration and writing attempts) and went over the words together. Now he is creating his own resource in a writing journal context for the next time he needs an "ap" word and can't remember how to write it. Less than 30 minutes total for reading together, narrating, writing together and phonics lesson and best of all, he was happy to do it because it was "his" and he was so excited to share what he'd learned with his daddy at lunch. I feel good because I'm not trying to fit his reading and writing around a phonics lesson, but am finding a phonics lesson to fit what my son has a made a reading and writing connection with. Tomorrow we will go over the "ap" word family list, along with a few others we've done like "ow" (for the plow he drew the other day) and "at" (for a cat). So for me, I think I've decided on a way to teach phonics in the context of reading, speaking and writing (which was how I used to do it in the first place and loved it), and I have my confidence back. The best thing about this is that I can do this method all of the way through high school if I want to. I'm still going to buy a phonics resource when we need them, but english.donnayoung.org has great info. for everything from spelling to the rules of grammar, and there are lots of other sites that can help with this, so maybe I can keep my wallet in check for a few more years.
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Thank you so much for your post. I had decided not to get a phonics resource, but there was so much helpful information in your post. Thanks!
I'm wondering if you could give me a little lesson. I don't really understand the word family thing. I believe Elizabeth talks about it in her book and if I'm remembering right Ruth Beechik does in one of her 3R's books. Is it just gathering words with a similar combination of letters or sounds? Is there a system to knowing what combinations to gather? I have the WISE guide for spelling and we studied a list of phonograms in there. Do you gather by phonograms? It's all a little confusing to me. I would certainly rather teach phonics in a laid back style like this, but what would push me into a program is my ignorance. Maybe you can guide me out of this.
(BTW Marybeth, I think having the dictionary nearby is a wonderful plan! I do this for myself a lot. My son has some strange aversion to the dictionary  , but maybe eventually he'll warm to it if I'm looking up words during our read-a-louds?)
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Marybeth
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| Posted: May 28 2005 at 10:39pm | IP Logged
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Richelle,
I had a dictionary aversion myself until I received my own as a gift. Whew...what a Christmas present!!!
I have to say I am well over my aversion now and actually look forward to finding out the meaning of words.
Marybeth
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Marybeth
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| Posted: May 28 2005 at 10:54pm | IP Logged
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Richelle,
I always used Word Family books by Scholastic to teach word families in my classroom. It is teaching a system of decoding to children using "chunks" of words. I plan to have a word wall in our home with word families to familiarize our ds with different patterns.
ie:fat
cat
sat
mat
Pat
You can incorporate word families in many ways.
www.literacyconnections.com
This site is very helpful for info. on teaching and also books for purchase.
God bless,
Marybeth
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saintanneshs
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| Posted: May 29 2005 at 9:48pm | IP Logged
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Dear Richelle,
I'm glad my post helped.
As far as word families go, and this is no technical definition or anything, they are words with the same vowel sound(s) and you can make them rhyme (as Marybeth demonstrated in her post above). Some of the word families included on the www.enchantedlearning.com website are ack, ad, ail, ain, ake, ale, all, am, etc. There's a whole long list of them, and you have to pay the member's fee to get access to this setion of the site, but I think there are other sites with the same info. for free...I'll look around to see if any of my bookmarks have this.
Truth be told though, you don't need a list to work from (I never had one when I taught my K and 1st gr. students to read and write...I just happened to stumble across them when I was checking out the EC site). What I plan to do is just wait until we do our writing journal page for the morning and see what my son wants to draw a picture of (that's the level we're on now and we will hopefully move on to a writing topic sometime in the next year) and then base my phonics lesson on that. The morning read-aloud provides more than a ton of journal topics. For example, if he says, "Mommy, I want to draw a fish from the story," I'll ask him to say the word "fish" and then say it again slowly. We call this "stretching it out" and then he writes the sounds he hears. For now, he only hears a few sounds from each word. I'm happy if he gets the beginning consonant and a vowel and an ending consonant (maybe just "fi" for fish since he probably won't remember that s and h together make the sound of "shhhhh," even though I've told him). When we finish going over what he has written and I've praised him for his efforts and written the word "fish" above his word, I would write -ish over to the side of his page and under the -ish I would make a list of words like fish, wish, dish and underline the ish letters in all of the words. If I wanted to be really ambitious (and I thought my son was ready), I'd write -ash beside the -ish and then make another word family list, underlining the ash in all of the words, focusing on words that end in -sh. And there you have it...instant word family lists!
As you can see with this method of teaching writing and phonics in combination, there is no way one could work from a list of word families and base the child-directed writing on the phonemes (to be covered on the list). I do this process in reverse. I just go with whatever lesson presents itself and have faith that my child will use and learn from the resource we are creating together. If he doesn't, there are always other methods to try, right?! I figure it worked for me before so I'll at least give it a try again. Anyway, that's how I choose my word families. I know that if we continue with this method, he will eventually cover a huge list of word families over the course of the years and that they will grow in difficulty as he progresses.
One more thing that makes retaining word families helpful...I use our writing time to teach the cute little sing-song pneumonic devices that we all remember, like "The e at the end makes the vowel in the middle say it's name. It's name is___," or "When 2 vowels go walking, the first one does the talking..." Last week I showed my Luke how -ow (from his plow picture) makes the sound you say when you get pinched. I pretended to pinch him and he got so tickled over it, he couldn't wait to SHOW his Daddy what the letters ow say (I had to remind him to pretend!) Now he will remember that one of the sounds -ow makes is "Owwwww!" and whenever it comes up, we will add to that by showing him how -ow can also say "Ohhhhh" as in show, snow, etc. Most of the phonics scope and sequence charts wouldn't even begin to introduce -ow sounds until after all of the short vowels and some, if not all, of the long vowel combinations. I think, why wait? It's there, so give it to him. Maybe he won't get it yet but it doesn't hurt to try and we have plenty of time to cover all of the word families he needs. We do go back and read over the phonics lessons we've created from time to time, to help with retention. I could even make up a list of spelling words from the lessons to test what he's retained, but I'm not going to do that, at least not now...I think he's just too little for that and our focus is on having fun writing the sounds we hear.
Using word families to teach phonics in their writing journals, my school kids would start out the year with consonants. I expected my kindergarteners to write 1 consonant (usually the beginning sound) in their journals, under their picture, whatever it was...(P for a pig). Then after awhile, I'd ask for 2 sounds (usually 2 consonants or a vowel) and then a few weeks later, the ending sound and then (sometime mid-year) we'd start with the student dictating a sentence to me about the picture. I'd write it, they'd copy it (copywork). After a few weeks it was their turn to write 2 words from their sentence (independently) and I could pick a word family from either of the 2 words they attempted. At this point I began covering sentence structure and written grammar (as it applied to their writing for that day) and since they were already accustomed to corrections of their spoken grammar, this was nothing new. By the end of the year, most of my kids were writing 3-4 complete sentences without any help from me and I had to make them stop writing because they could go on forever and our language time-block was up. Of course sometimes the sentences had spelling mistakes, especially when they took a shot at some really tricky words, but I was so proud of them for using what they knew to take a chance on the unknown. I only hope things go that well with my own children!
Also, I like Catholic Heritage Curricula's Language of God (grammar study) and Little Stories for Little Folks (phonics filled with word family study) for backup resources. They are inexpensive and thorough. I hope that if I pull them off of my shelf every once in awhile, I'll be reminded of the skills I need to address at the levels which are out of my comfort zone (beyond K and 1)! Heaven help me then!
I hope this answers your question...I've got to stop writing these books!
__________________
Kristine
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saintanneshs
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| Posted: May 29 2005 at 10:11pm | IP Logged
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I forgot to say that my son likes this silly game we made up and we play with word families. We call it "The Happy Game" and we play it at least once a week to review our word families we made in his journal. It looks just like Hangman except the first letter(s) of the words are omitted and the endings are written out. I write the alphabet at the top of the dry erase board and my boys choose letters to try to make a word. It looks like this: __ut __un __up (and repeat in vertical columns). Every time the boys choose a letter that makes a word, they get to draw another body part in their square at the bottom of the board and every time they choose a letter that doesn't make a word, I get to draw a body part in my box. It's called "The Happy Game" because we don't add the smiley faces until the very end and whoever's drawing is happiest (first)...wins. I didn't realize until just now how corny this sounds, but my boys love it since they get to use markers which (with 3 boys 5 and under) are practically contraband in our house!
Does anyone else have any new (homemade) phonics games to share?
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Kristine
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tovlo4801
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| Posted: May 30 2005 at 9:24am | IP Logged
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Kristine,
I LOVE your suggestions and it does definitely help me out! I've never minded people writing books either. If you hadn't written so much I wouldn't have gotten so much good information.
We had used the www.starfall.com site for a while this winter and some of their phonics games had little tunes similar to what you wrote. Now when I have my son read and he get's stuck I'm very likely to sing, "The e at the end of the word makes the _(a,e,i...) say it's name," or the two vowels go a walking one was on that site too.
I'm going to look more closely at the CHC books. I've been to their site many times, looking around. I've just never felt strongly enough to buy anything, but it might be very good for me to have a resource as I work with my little one.
Again, thank you so much for your help. I may call on you if we run into trouble along the way. 
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Meredith
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| Posted: June 28 2005 at 12:54pm | IP Logged
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All these posts are so wonderful and helpful. Just adding my .02, I have taught 2 of my children to read so far with The Little Stories for Little Folks program through CHC. It's very simple and straight forward and is phonics based. The best thing about it is they begin to READ right away which is a huge boost to their confidence when they are just beginning.
You can see samples at chcweb.com
HTH someone who is shopping for more ideas.
__________________
Meredith
Mom of 4 Sweeties
Sweetness and Light
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Marybeth
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| Posted: June 28 2005 at 1:56pm | IP Logged
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So glad to hear it since I just bought Stories for Little Folks off a friend who moved. It is always nice to hear something you have planned to use actually worked!
Marybeth
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ALmom
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| Posted: June 28 2005 at 6:45pm | IP Logged
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Someone asked for phonics games - here are a few we play:
Pick a Sound which came with an expensive phonics program we ordered (Sing-Spell-Read and Write). I don't know if you can order it seperately or not, but it would be easy to make yourself using the phonograms from any number of things (any alphabet cards plus a few additional things like ow, etc.) It is played like go-fish except you ask by the letter sound. We start with the simplest and most common sounds and work from there. Our children all loved playing this and most of the youngers did it for fun long before formal schooling. The olders - even years after moving beyond phonics- still like to sprawl on the floor and play it with the youngers.
I bought some foam alphabet letters (Lori) in upper and lower case and different colors. We got tiny plastic drawers(from cheap bins for storing screws and nails) and arranged them in a large bread box. We use one color for vowels and one color for consonents. My dc would play with putting the letters together and ask what it said. I'd tell them if it was a real word or not and then pronounce it according to the phonics rules (whether or not it was a real word). They became very quick at finding word families themselves as they became intent on making as many words as they could as fast as they could. This is basically a cheap imitation of a Montisorri (movable alphabet I think is what they called it). I got the Montissori catelogues - in full color and imitated what I could.
We got a recipe card size notebook and cut it in thirds.
On the first third write all the simple consonents, in the middle the vowels and on the last third, the consonents again. Again - instant word families. You could make another one more advanced by adding consonent blends, dipthongs, etc as well as using the vowel pairs. It doesn't do for the silent e, or silent letters. These type things can just be around for dc to use as interested - mine really took to these and had a lot of fun in spurts and then moved on.
Sing Spell Read and Write had song tapes with their program for things like Mr. Gh, but I don't think that's worth getting if you have to pay much for them. Since we have them, we use them. They are fun in the car for those areas we are working on.
Also for a cheap and easy parent reference - The Writing Road to Reading is very thourough but I would have a hard time using it to teach reading.
Wanda Sanseri wrote The Wise Guide for Spelling for people using the program just as a spelling program. It has spelling rules and charts in the book - we blew them up and laminated them for reference. I wouldn't run out and purchase it if you just have younger children - but if you need a phonics review later to remediate spelling this works well. (We used it with our dd who had horrible trouble with reversals, spelling etc, (due to a vision problem) despite CHC phonics program (which was sweet, simple, inexpensive and thourough). She used it when she was 4/5 grade age wise. It would be hard to imagine it with a much younger child - very intense.
Scrabble is fun - there are word games similar to it for youngers like Boggle Jr and Scrabble cubes, as well as Boggle. Our family likes to play scrabble. It does drag out as we let all the younger children use dictionaries. It is after toddlers are in bed or are otherwise occupied or it becomes disaster.
If you notice a child having difficulty with hearing certain sounds, you can always reinforce with a fun cut and paste type activity - old magazines or useless workbooks with pictures you can cut out. Then glue a textured letter on construction paper and let the children cut out what begins with this letter sound and make a collage of it on construction paper. Some of ours enjoyed this - some didn't.
Janet
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Marybeth
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| Posted: June 28 2005 at 11:56pm | IP Logged
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There are some very fun games using the Leap Pad or Leapster systems. They can be pricey so I usually ask for them for b-day, Christmas, etc.
We also have been using some computer games recently which have been very helpful for my ds.
Marybeth
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Karen T
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I have been doing some very basic phonics with ds, almost 6, for about 6 mos now. I began with Teach your child to read in 100 EZ lessons, and we went through about 5 lessons but he really wasn't getting it and didn't enjoy it so I quit for awhile. At the time he knew only 5-6 letters of the alphabet to name, and none by sound other than his own name first letter. So I've been focusing more on teaching him the sounds of the letters in a very informal way, pointing them out while reading, making rhymes, etc. (he still doesn't "hear" rhymes). We got The Letter Factory video and he and dd have watched it about once a week for several months. He still knows very few sounds, esp. when seeing the written letter. I've started with Phonics Pathways over the past few weeks with similar results. It begins with the vowels, one at a time, but progresses to one new letter each lesson. Right after going over them, he's pretty good at naming the sounds, but by the next day, he can't remember any of them.
I know some kids just aren't ready at this age, so I may just back off again, but I also don't want to ignore a possible problem. My oldest son knew all his letters and most of the sounds by starting kindergarten, and was reading by this age. This son, Mark, had a very severe speech delay that required a lot of therapy but he is completely caught up now and speaks quite well. However, I've read that some kids with apraxia (one of his problems) are more likely to be dyslexic.
To switch gears midstream here, dd who is almost 4, usually participates in the "lessons" with him, and even though she actually remembers the letters better, she has some odd speech patterns that make it hard for her to say short a and short e correctly. She also had a speech delay but was much milder and required only about 6 mos of therapy. Now I'm wondering if she needs re-evaluation or if it will sort itself out on its own. There are lots of other sounds she says wrong, too, but these are so basic to phonics I almost hate for her to be learning the letter symbols pairing them with "incorrect" sounds if that makes sense.
Karen T
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Mary G
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| Posted: Sept 08 2005 at 6:46am | IP Logged
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happyheartsmom wrote:
All these posts are so wonderful and helpful. Just adding my .02, I have taught 2 of my children to read so far with The Little Stories for Little Folks program through CHC. It's very simple and straight forward and is phonics based. The best thing about it is they begin to READ right away which is a huge boost to their confidence when they are just beginning.
You can see samples at chcweb.com
HTH someone who is shopping for more ideas. |
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I have to second this vote! My 6 yos was a bit reluctant to start reading -- didn't like blending sounds to get words altho I knew he could do it. This year I got the CHC Little Stories and he has already done 6 of the books....he likes playing the Silly Willy sentences game and the word family game. Also, we have a boggle-like game that is dice with letters -- yesterday we played for 20 minutes and took turns, with him having to read all the words -- he thought that was great!
There's also a site called Right Track Reading -- her book is pretty good altho it's just a resource for parents as it's very black and white (literally) -- she cuts out all bells and whistles to save time and money. She's got some great homemade games to play -- so this is a very inexpensive option. Her website has lots of info if you're interested.
Blessings
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MaryG
3 boys (22, 12, 8)2 girls (20, 11)
my website that combines my schooling, hand-knits work, writing and everything else in one spot!
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Mary G
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| Posted: Sept 19 2005 at 9:02am | IP Logged
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As an addendum to my previous post -- Thomas, who has decided he loves the word family thing -- today, played the word family game and WROTE the words as he found them. For some reason, he loves this -- I had to stop him to go outside for recess --
I NEVER liked the writing part (till I discovered computers ) and there's my 6 yos lapping it up!
Go figure!
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MaryG
3 boys (22, 12, 8)2 girls (20, 11)
my website that combines my schooling, hand-knits work, writing and everything else in one spot!
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: teaching reading/phonics
