Phonics for Dummies

Susan M. Greve

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118068304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Features kid- and parent-friendly tips and activities

The fun and easy way to grasp the ABCs of reading

Want to introduce your child to reading, or strengthen your child's reading skills? This fun and entertaining guide shows you how to use phonics as an easy and engaging path to reading. Phonics For Dummies contains tips on mastering letter sounds in reading, activities to engage your child's enthusiasm, and advice for making reading interesting and fun.

Discover how to:

• Use phonics to learn to read
• Improve reading and spelling skills
• Master unusual sounds and spellings
• Build your child's vocabulary
• Play games that encourage progress

All this on the audio CD:

• Dozens of letter sounds in friendly lessons
• Keywords to help your child with reading and spelling
• Easy examples and tips for your child to follow

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Part I

Getting Ready to Read with Phonics

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

I n the chapters in Part I, I tell you what phonics is and show you how to teach phonics concepts to your child. You also get the tools you need to help your child use her knowledge as she learns to read more difficult words and sentences. I also provide fun ways to reinforce the lessons, and explain how to tell when your child is ready to move ahead with her reading skills. By the end of this part, your child will be able to read her first words!

Chapter 1

Pondering the Power of Phonics

In This Chapter

Understanding phonics and how phonics is taught

Preparing your child to learn phonics

Discovering how phonics concepts build on one another

You’ve already seen your child through walking, talking, eating with utensils, potty training, and countless other processes. Reading is just another part of growing and discovering. Reading is necessary for success in life, and phonics can help. Phonics is a method of word recognition. It helps children understand how to slide letter sounds together to form words. If you’re curious and have some knowledge of phonics, you need to know from the get-go that this book presents a specific phonics approach to reading and spelling. This book, in itself, is very basic because I wrote it for a parent and a child. But no matter what age you are, this book can help you.

Several years ago I taught phonics to two middle-aged men. Both had suffered from look/say teaching in grade school, and had feeble decoding and spelling skills. I taught the same lessons that applied to any beginner: the sequential flashcards and the vowel chart. After they realized that they could decode unknown words, they were on their way. Because they were both intelligent and successful people, they applied their knowledge and greatly improved their skills.

In this chapter, I give you a brief introduction to phonics and the way this book approaches it to help you and your child master the art of reading. This chapter also outlines the concepts you see throughout this book and how I (as an experienced phonics tutor) approach the subject with children. With equal doses of patience and perseverance, and help from this book, your phonics routine will run as smoothly as a fine-tuned Cadillac.

Taking the First Steps toward Using Phonics

Getting your child reading at the earliest possible age and keeping him happy at the same time makes the whole process of learning to read easier. Learning to read isn’t supposed to consume every moment. As your child enters this stage of discovery, he needs to be busy with other things — like playing outside, having a hobby or two, learning board games, experimenting with art supplies, and so on.

The phonics approach to reading proves itself to be the best. It isn’t reading in itself; it’s the best method for word recognition, far superior to the look/ say (see the word/say the word) approach. Phonics covers all the bases. Sliding sounds together to make words gives way to instant recognition of the words as you progress in your reading. Phonics training also makes for excellent spellers.

Phonics, quite simply, is a method of learning to read in which you connect sounds with letters or groups of letters. For example, c, k, and ck can all represent one sound: /k/.

The term phonic shouldn’t be confused with the word phonetic, which simply describes the sound of human speech. I use phonetic occasionally in this book when describing sounds of letters or words, but the term doesn’t apply to the letters or words themselves.

Some words are purely phonetic in that they don’t have any sort of visual reference, such as the words and or but. Words that have a visual reference, such as nouns like cat or rabbit, are often referred to as sight words or look/say words throughout this book.

Whether you choose home-school or regular school for your child, your goal is to educate him to his unique capacity. You want to help him develop his inherent talents and abilities, which will serve him for his entire life. When you teach him to read, you’re there with him at the beginning of his intellectual achievement.

Phonics For Dummies contains a program that you can use to instruct your child in how to read. There are many methods for teaching phonics, but the one used in this book involves teaching a child to read starting with the following:

The most frequently used words

The most often used letters that make up the words

The easiest-to-sound letters that make up a word

This means that you aren’t teaching the alphabet in alphabetical order, which may be a new concept to you, but it’s a successful and tried-and-true method.

You can use this method to help your child pronounce the consonant and vowel sounds of the alphabet, decode words, and read. Your child will learn guidelines for interpreting different letter patterns. Along the way, he’ll discover how to read in a logical and methodical manner. The phonics program breaks down learning into succinct, compact units so that your child can learn one skill at a time without getting frustrated. Phonics becomes fun and easy for your child.

There is a bit of a controversy regarding how to teach phonics. Educators disagree about how large a role phonics should play in learning to read and how often teachers should use phonics in teaching reading. But learning to read, spell, and write is only part of phonics.

The phonics approach I present in this book enables your child to think logically in terms of reading and spelling words. He’ll develop techniques for processing and using the information. You’ll see him progress quickly from lesson to lesson.

A remarkable offshoot of phonics

When you take the phonics approach to teaching your child to read, your child learns to use his language skills in an organized way. The method starts with the most basic elements of language and then builds on them a little at a time. Your child is accumulating layers of skill and is able to hang on to them. (Saxon math books take a similar approach to mathematics.)

You’ve probably heard someone say something like, “My mind is like a sieve! I read or hear something, and it goes right on through!” Teaching your child with an organized method keeps him from ever having to utter these words. It’s akin to painting a great piece of art by using the brush as a tool rather than splashing paint and allowing it to stick where it may. Learning to read with phonics (the brush...