#50 - Phonics

Heather's comment to my last post reminded me of something I meant to bring up in said post.

There is a wonderful book I'm using to teach my 5-year-old to read and I just want to recommend it to everyone.

It's called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.



I love it so much because it's completely phonics-based, and it introduces concepts very slowly and seamlessly. Every lesson seems so easy because it's almost exactly like the lesson before, but just barely different enough to learn something new. Each lesson is mostly review, in other words. My daughter is constantly wanting to skip lessons because it's so easy.

When Heather brought up the 'l' in walk, etc. it made me think of a tactic that is used in the "100 Easy Lessons" book.

The child sounds out the word (wwwww-aaaaa-lllll-kkkk) (remember, the a will sound like the a in apple) and the parent says, "Yes, we sound it out ww-aa-ll-kk, but we say it 'walk'. It's a funny word." So every time the child goes to say that word, the parent says, "Remember, this is a funny word."

The reason I was going to include it with my last post is because there are a lot of "funny words" in the English language!!!

I do have to give one disclaimer for the book, however. I tried to teach my oldest child to read with the same book and it was a disaster. She did learn to read pretty well, through the first half of the book, but even then it was a struggle. It was more a personality problem between the two of us in general than it was anything to do with the reading program itself, but it's proof that no one method is best for everyone.

With that said, though, if your child is at the age where they're ready to start reading and you want to give them a head start, or if they're having a hard time learning to read in school, go and get a copy of this book. I think it's wonderful. You can see some sample pages by following the link above and clicking on the picture of the book on Amazon's site.