Our ds has just turned 4 and for about 3 months has been nagging us 'i want to read' but he has speech delay, so f, s, th, c, to name a few come out different! he has therapy for it, but if we try to teach him to read using the phonic approach he will get frustrated as he cant say the sounds! We have used teach your child to read, phonic pathways, ordinary parents guide for our older dd, so they wont be wasted as the younger ones wil use them so we need a book/system like the above books (laid out for the me!) to teach him without phonics, so was thinking like dolch list etc, but also first readers which he can try as well hope this all makes sense
I never learned phonics as a kid, had no clue what the word phonics meant until I was an adult looking at curriculum for my kids. I just learned by site words.. my mom would read me the same books over and over.. at my request I might add, and as she read she ran her fingers along. I learned that when I saw that word it sounded like this and when I saw that one it sounded like that. Not sure how much that makes sense, but hope it helps some.
You can get the Dolch list on line, and make up flashcards from it. Then talk with the librarian about books made up almost exclusively with Dolch words. Don't give up on phonics, though! Sure, he can't "say" them right, but he can still hear them (I assume).
I agree w/Sommer. Just read, read, read. I always read insane amounts of books to Daniel, and he started reading at 3. Now he's 7 and reads on maybe a 5th grade level. We never did phonics and I don't plan on it for the little princess either.
our library has kids books on audio. So you check out the book and the audio and the child can read along as the narrator reads. They usually have a sound to indicate turning the page and have neat sound effects to make it fun. Just be sure to choose simple books since he is only 4. IMO if it were my child I would start out with very age appropriate books, and then take it slow, I would treat it more as a 'phase'. I know at 4 reading seems 'bigstuff' but when he sees the work involved, you don't want him to be discouraged, just move him to work on something else, if that happens. I'm thinking phonics is the most common way to learn and probably works the best, but again that depends on the child. If you think the speech trouble will last a long time, you may not be able to teach by phonics. If you think it is something he would 'outgrow' in a couple years, I would just hold off on getting too serious on the reading, unless he is determined.
thank you he is a very determined young man, and enjoys books, will try some flashcards and see how he gets on
I used to listen to/read with books on tape.. or well back then they were those little round records (hehehe, man I'm old, my kids don't even know what a record is!), and they did help alot!! Funny those things aren't popular anymore, they were a great tool! I had tons of them!
Oh goody! Will you please answer some questions for me? I have heard others say that they never learned phonics. How you would figure out unfamilar words when you encountered them? I theorized that even though they didn't formally learn phonics, they, on their own, deduced the most prominent rules of phonics and then applied them to new words. Is my theory correct? Do you remember have trouble with words you had never seen before? Would you have been able to read non-sense words like are in Dr. Seus books? I'm not starting a debate about phonics versus whole word. Obviously, they both have merit, because I learned by one, and you learned by the other, and we can both read and write. I just have had an academic curiosity about it and have wondered if there is a way to figure out which method works best for which child.
Alice, I didn't learn phonics,and I have had a hard time pronouncing words that are unfamiliar to me. My husband actually showed me how to sound them out correctly. LOL I also have terrible spelling, and I attribute that to not knowing the phonics/spelling rules.
I guess if you really dissect how I learned to read, I made up phonics on my own. As I came to words that I didn't already know, I would think of words I knew that had those parts in them and pieced those word parts together (if you think of it it's almost like learning a list of root words and then lists of prefixes and suffixes). I still wouldn't consider it phonics, it, to me anyway, is more like word dissection and surgery...lol.
Oh, and I also, on my own, figured out what letter made what sound and would put individual sounds together.. I never though sh says shhhh I thought s+h says sh if that makes sense.
My oldest struggled with reading. I had no luck with some of the curriulums out there so we started using dolch word lists and built from there.
My children are all speech delayed, yet, they all learned on phonics. We have never done it any way. I know there is a debate about it, but, I do not think learning through sight words is a good idea. Many people think that it limits how far one can go with reading. The good news about the speech delay and phonics..just because they cannot say it does not mean they cannot learn what it looks like or sounds like. Unless he is having major issues understanding what you say (i.e. hearing impairment) then there would be no reason to not teach phonics.
Many of the Dolch words defy phonics rules. You MUST learn some words "whole", while there are others you must decipher by context. (Example: READ can be pronounced with a long E sound..."Will you READ me a story?" or a short one..."I read that book already." ALL of these skills must come together for a person to read accurately. People need to realize that they are not EXCLUSIVE of each other! (Personally, I LOVE "Whole Language", which is different from "Whole Word" and includes all the above!)
I agree with Jackie. We use a both. We do traditional phonics but do have a sight word list that has words that can not be decoded.
My mom read to me ALL the time during preschool and kindergarten. Mother goose rhymes and Dr. Seuss books. Dr. Seuss books probably the WORST for learning phonics with all the made up words and words spelled incorrectly. But, I learned to read quite well.
So you figured out the rules but just haven't classified them in the same way as phonetisists (that's probably a made up word) have. I imagined this is what would happen. After all, kids basically figure out most of the rules of grammar before being taught formal grammar. But Aggie01, you actually memorized words as whole objects. That's amazing. We all have thousands of words memorized as adults that we can read without even wanting to, but for me, those words were placed in my mind one sound at a time. Initially, I had to only memorize about seventy sounds. It seems like you, however, had to initially store thousands of whole words. I imagine that it would be like memorizing a unique pictograph for each word. I wonder, do you think that you have an above-average ability to remember facts and/or to memorize things in general? Mumof3 -- My son could not say those sounds when he started to read either. He just made the sounds to the best of his ability and moved on. I mean, in speaking, he didn't avoid all the words with those troubling sounds in them, so why should he have in reading?. A method, using phonics, that may work for your son is to teach him to sound out the word in his head before saying it. The sounds he can make in his mind are going to be accurate whether his mouth wants to cooperate or not. He can then say the word as he would normally. I think that phonics actually helped my son with his speech problems. In fact, the speech therapist used phonics in his sessions. She'd say, "Let's make the /sh/ sound. Remember, that's the "Hush" sound." She'd hold up a card with a picture of someone with one finger at his mouth saying,"Shhhh".
