I vacillate between unschooling and a desire to bring formal school elements into my daughter’s life. This week, she has really taken to the school side of things, to phonics, much to my delight. At the end of last week we actually spent several hours on our phonics book at her request. During that time, she sounded out her first word. Granted, that word was only two letters, but she did it by herself instead of having me coach her. To me, that shows that she is beginning to understand the process of sounding out phonetic words. Although I know that she would be able to go far on memorized words, it’s always helpful to have that ability to sound things out phonetically. Sometimes even I need to do that when I run into a new word.
I am someone with a very good visual memory, though my daughter now seems to beat me in that regard. This means that we are also working on sight words, specifically the Dolch words. These high frequency words make up a large portion of the English language, and if children recognize and understand them then they will not need to sound them out – they’ll act as assistants in understanding whole sentences. To this end, we are playing with Dolch word memory cards and making up games to help her identify the words on the cards. No, we’re not using them as straight flashcards. I don’t think that would fly, unfortunately.
The other way we are teaching reading and language is the way that most families do. I don’t know if my child would have been a spontaneous reader had I left her to her own devices. However, we simply read. By surrounding her with reading and writing, I assume that this will increase her desire to learn these skills that are so present in adults in our society, however we choose to do it.
How do you teach reading?