Piper’s comment on learning to read by “sounding out” is that it requires a story designed for that since so many common words cannot be sounded out.  For example:

home, but come         go, but do              red, but read,

bone, but gone           bone, but one       one, but won         won, but won’t.

How is a child supposed to know when to try to sound out a word?  A whole sentence often becomes nonsense if just one word doesn’t make sense, and then the child thinks reading is hard , and even worse, thinks he is dumb.

Most stories that omit non-phonetic “sight words” are neither good nor interesting.

Dr Seuss made many rhymes with words that are not spelled with similar endings, unless they are his own phonetically spelled make-believe words.

We don’t usually teach reading phonetically — we usually teach by modeling — which is the faster way for children to learn to read.  The tutor starts by modeling the word, helps child get the meaning.  Can the child differentiate easily between saw and was?  The tutor can suggest sentences like “I saw the dog, I walked the dog, I was the dog, I petted the dog”, laughing to emphasize how silly it would sound to say “I was the dog.”  The correct word makes sense in context.

Here is one example of how a particular child was introduced to phonics. He had already learned to read  Dog and dog-cat   without phonics.

At that stage, he was interested in and it was appropriate to introduce him to Bears on Wheels by Berenstain, a book about numbers. I wanted to make sure he could read both a numeral and its matching word, such as  “2″ and the word “two”, gradually working up to “four” and “five”, which both start with the same letter but end differently.  Bears on Wheels is especially good for this, since the child can count the noses of the bears on each page to make sure he is reading the word correctly.  I knew that we could build on that success to bring to his attention  the r at the end of four and the v near the end of five, telling him to look at my lips as I pronounced “four” and “five”.  After he happily won a few stickers for that much, I then introduced the variation of covering up the pictures, saying excitedly, “Now try to read it even without looking at the picture!”  I could see the light-bulbs going on as Johnny realized that sometimes sounds of letters (phonics) can be very useful, when no picture or helpful adult is available to tell you the right word.

Reminder: As usual, if Johnny succeeds in reading four or five correctly , without clues from the picture (which has been totally covered up) the tutor says, “Great!  Here’s a sticker for you!”  Or, also as usual, if Johnny does not succeed on the first try, the tutor laughs and says “Good try! Choose your sticker for trying!”  Notice the immediate choice for Johnny: which of 4 or 5 stickers does he like best? (We avoid giving Johnny time to worry about not getting the right answer!! We build confidence that it’s OK to make mistakes! See Chapter: Responsibility of the Tutor)

What do I do if I discover one of my students can recognize the word “five” or “four” on a page, but when asked “How many fingers am I holding up?” he doesn’t yet understand the correspondence between the word “four” and the number of fingers he can see? If this is the case, then we stop teaching phonics and reading and switch gears to establishing understanding of this number concept first. We don’t want to teach children to read something that they don’t yet understand.