Phonics

So there is always a lot of talk among early elementary teachers about reading, phonics, and spelling. As a parent I homeschool because I want what is best for my kids but figuring out what is best is really hard. So I'm always really excited when something I do seems to work well.

When it comes to teaching reading I'm of the phonics first school of thought. Instead of starting with stories and emphasizing use of pictures to help recognize words, I focus first on letter sounds and blending sound. Charry did very well with that method so I had some confidence as I started with Merry.

One of my favorite activities is building words with letter flashcards. I use a set from leap frog. Together we sound out the ending sound ("an" and "at" were the ones we started with) then Merry added the beginning sound then read the whole word

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After working on sounding out words we get out my favorite beginning reader books, the "Now I'm Reading " series by Nora Gaydos. Merry started "Fat Cat." It was so exciting to see how proud she was of her new skills.

It has also been exciting for me to find a spelling program with a phonics emphasis. I had been a little wary of the memorize a list of words each week approach that seem to be so prevalent. Because of that I had put off teaching spelling until this year. But this year I found a program called "All About Spelling" it starts of with phonographs and then teaches how the phonographs build words. My favorite part of the program is that it breaks down the lessons into easy to do segment for the teacher. As an atrocious, who regularly depends of spell check I didn't even know where to start and really needed everything spelled out for me. Charry likes starting with the basics and is learning already.