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Phonics
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What Phonics program can I use for my nearly 6 yr old? He knows all the letter sounds and is just starting to blend them. I am thinking either The Ordinary Parents Guide to Reading or the Reading Reflex which doesn’t teach the phonics rules directly but through examples the child picks them up. What do people here like?
We’ve loved Reading Made Easy and the Pathway Readers. Can I ask where you found that beautiful painting, which you use for your profile pic? I absolutely love it!
We like Alpha-Phonics and the Pathway Readers. I once bought and reviewed the Ordinary Parents Guide to Reading, but it was too scripted and the pages too busy for my liking.
Blessings,
Christie
We have used, and will continue to use, Reading Reflex. For me, it was the best fit. I used it with my 8yo after a stint with Sing, Spell, Read and Write. I was new to homeschooling a kindergartener and used what was given to me. We purchased new workbooks but had everything else in the kit for free. Although my son loved it. After a while I ended up not being super crazy about it and the fact I did not choose it myself kind of bothered me.
Fast forward several years and I really like Reading Reflex. I found it on a shelf labeled “Free” so I thumbed through it and felt it was a perfect fit for my brain. I read it at home for awhile, cut the book up for the games/lessons (which took a while, but it was free, so I went with it) and haven’t used anything else to teach and reteach my boys. I used it with my 11yo to sharpen his skills (he was about 91/2 at the time, maybe a little older) and my 8yo (he was about 61/2 or so) and put the SSRW away. I did use the SSRW for certain things (before we converted all the way to the CM style), but I just didn’t like the way it approached teaching the child…One using one way to refer to the letters and the sounds they represent and the other a completely different way. Well I got tired of having to skip pages, etc., so I had to choose just one and it was the RR.
I will be using the Reading Reflex with my 4 1/2 yo when the time is right. I’m already starting some of the games that are suggested, but nothing scheduled or set in stone, just for fun right now.
They have a website and I did purchase some of their material but after receiving it I realized I could’ve easily skipped those. I didn’t spend much, but still…hth
We like Happy Phonics and the Now I’m Reading series by Nora Gaydos. Happy Phonics is mostly games which one of my sons really needed, lots of repetition without getting bored. It’s worked well for 3 of the 4 thus far. The 4th isn’t quite old enough yet.
I didn’t use anything with my oldest (now 20.) My now 7yo had great success with Reading Made Easy. My 6yo Chinese son is starting slowly. I’m using Ruth Beechick’s little book, An Easy Start in Reading, I think it’s called.
I would second Ruth Beechick’s book mentioned above, which gives some simple guidelines for teaching reading and phonics without a ‘program’. I wish I had found this before I started in to teaching my daughter to read. I had started out with a phonics book, but recently ditched the phonics book for good (It was “Phonics Pathways” in case anyone wants to know, but like I said, we just ditched it, so can’t say I reccomend it!). Even before I felt comfortable enough ditching the phonics book completely, my daughter had a hard time reading lessons out of it directly (it was overwhelming to see so many lists of words on the page) so I was mostly using the word lists and practice sentences in the book to make little card games and practice readers for her. She’s gotten to the point that she is blending and reading 3 and 4 letter words fairly easily, but was getting really bored with the limited number of little ‘readers’ that I could give her to read (mostly the first set of Bob books, and a couple other similar things that I picked up for her), and always complaining that she had “read these already”. So just last week I pulled out a Dick and Jane book we had and just taught her the words that she didn’t know as sight words so we could keep reading. I plan to use those words to build word lists of words in the same families to teach the rest of the different phonics rules as we encounter them, rather than being limited by the order and sequence in the phonics book (which was keeping too many good stories out of her reach.) She loved having a completely new story to read, and has enthusiastically read to me from it of her own choice all weekend and I am loving the fact that we are back to where she is loving reading rather than getting bored with it before she has even gotten started! The SCM early years book has a section on beginning reading in the back, which I think was based on CM’s method of teaching reading, which was also helpful to me in coming up with this new ‘plan’ for our family.
I have not tried the Reading Reflex, but have successfully taught my oldest daughter to read when she was 4 using the Ordinary Parent’s Guide. She is 6 now and reads very well. She will just open up her ESV Bible and start reading and even come and tell me somthing that she read that she thinks is good! (love that). I am now starting over again with my almost-5-year-old girl. She seems to enjoy it. Both of my girls knew all the sounds of the letters to begin with so I just skip the whole first section (the letter-sounds poem) and start with the actual reading of words.
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