To learn to read, your child has to learn phonics

Learning phonics takes a long time, but it is something your child must do in order to read correctly. Phonics is the foundation of reading, and without it your child will have trouble learning to read. On the internet and in bookstores there are many ways to learn to read.

Today, most use a phonetic-based system, but the full language system is still available. If your child, for whatever reason, cannot learn to read phonically, he should seek a whole language approach. I teach using phonetics, so I don’t know anything about the whole language system. Some teachers use it, so it might have some merit.

To introduce your child to phonics, check out some websites that have phonics games or phonics sounds so that your child can listen to the different sounds. The best phonics game sites that my kids like to play are Starfall and Genkienglish, a site from Japan in English. There are many other phonic game.com sites for teaching phonics to kids and here are some of the others I like, PBS Kids Site, Game Goo, Scholastic and Sadlier-Oxford.

I also like to make up the phonics in Montessori sandpaper letters so that the child can feel the shape of the letters. Tracing the letters helps implant the letter and sounds in the child’s mind. When tracing the letters the child must say the phonic sound at the same time.

With synthetic phonics, the child first learns all the phonic sounds and then moves on to words. With the Montessori approach, the child learns some phonics and then forms words using the sounds she has already learned. Also when the child is tracing the letter she is learning to write. I like this approach better, but it’s up to you and your child.

Most children are raised to recite the alphabet, so when they start learning to read phonics they have to relearn the sounds, as phonetic letters and sound combinations are different for the alphabet. When I teach phonics I try not to say the sounds of the letters of the alphabet that we all know.

Actually, there is no reason to learn the alphabet, since we never use it for anything other than something to learn. If you only learned the sounds of phonics, life would be easier. You should tell your children when they start learning to read phonics to forget the alphabet and start using the new sounds.

It isn’t long before your children realize the connection between phonics and words. After realizing this, phonics becomes easier and they begin to see words as sounds and try to pronounce the word correctly.

A big problem when your children start learning phonics is that they can read but they don’t understand what they are reading. They love the mechanics of reading and can read very well. You have to explain the words and the meaning of the sentences so that your children learn to love reading.