So you’re child is all dome learning their short vowel reading lists and you’re wondering which lesson to teach next… the answer is: transition games! Now is time to break out the movable alphabet again and play a transition game that demonstrates the difference between how you sound out short vowel words and long vowel words.

1)      Build the word “fad” with the moveable alphabet. Have your child sound it out and read it to you. Remember that vowels are in red and consonants are in blue.

2)      Now add the letter ‘e’ to the end of the “fad”. It becomes “fade”.

3)      Explain the difference to your child in the following way: “When you add ‘e’ to the end of this word, it makes the ‘a’ say its name. So instead of saying ‘a’ like apple, it says ‘a’ like ‘ape’. Now let’s sound out the word with the ‘e’ on the end…”

4)      Keep practicing this rule with different words “fat” becomes “fate”, “can” becomes “cane”, and so on.

5)      Follow the lesson sequence by having your child write down the new long vowel words. Read books that feature long vowels and play games that use them. The name of the game is reinforcement, reinforcement, reinforcement! J

I will always be a fan of Reading Rainbow! I honestly think it made a big impact on me during my childhood to have a love for reading and an appreciation for the way books can transport you from your daily life to places that you’ve only dreamt of. I’m glad that it is still a part of the PBS line up and of all the “reading shows” out there for children, I appreciate it the most.

How do you guys feel about reading programming? My worry is that they teach with “look-see” more than phonics. That’s not always the case, but I still worry that mixing such shows with what your child is learning in school may be detrimental or at least slow their learning somewhat. What do you guys think? Have you ever seen “Between the Lions” or “Word Girl” before? What do you think of them? Helpful of hindering?

Put a phonics spin on an old classic!

1)      Create bingo cards with short vowel, long vowel, or sight (Dolch) words.

2)      Call out a word and tell the players to put a stamp over the word when they find it on their card.

3)      When they match all three or five words (depending on if the card is 3×3 or 5×5) and yell BINGO, check and make sure they answered correctly. ( If they call BINGO incorrectly they're disqualified until the next round…)

Kids love this game! It’s a fun and easy way to reinforce reading skills. There are many resources on the internet that you can use to create and print out cards to use at home. Just do a little a research and you’ll be pleasantly surprised

Jackie had the awesome opportunity to learn phonics first as the basis of her reading training. As her teacher, I was able to start her lessons with letter recognition (recognizing them by their sounds and not their names), fun games and songs, and eventually letter blending. What I found with Jackie was that she was a very smart little girl, but was timid to learn new reading lessons. I think it was because she wanted to know all the rules right away and was afraid of making mistakes when she first learned new skills.

Because of this, I had to come up with a game plan to build her confidence and help her relax so that the new lessons came more easily to her. Much like the past posts I’ve done on building confidence, the key to helping Jackie build her confidence was through positive feedback, reinforcement, and turning lessons into non-threatening games. The awesome part is with those three tools, it only took the time for her to go through the five short vowels before I really didn’t have to rely on them anymore! Once she was comfortable with her skills and knew that a few mistakes happen along the way, but they’re no big deal, she was unstoppable!  

Tip of the day: Spend some time researching companies that sell phonics workbooks. Workbooks are very important because they solidify the reading skills your child learns and helps them learn critical writing skills.

Just be sure to present the lessons in the same order that your child is learning them in school. It’s okay to skip around in the book if you have to! It’s more important that you not confuse your child with lessons that they haven’t learned yet, right?

Anyone have a good company to recommend for phonics workbooks?

More than a decade ago, I had a student that was 7 years old and unable to read. Other schools had told his mother that he was learning disabled and would take years to learn how to read properly. These schools were not well versed in teaching phonics and the “look-see” method of reading just didn’t make sense to him. His mom was desperate to salvage his self esteem and help him learn to read before he grew out of his critical stage for learning.

The first day I started to teach him I could see that he had been misdiagnosed. The disconnect was occurring between knowing the sounds of the letters and being able to blend them into words. Because he was taught to only memorize words, he couldn’t make sense of the process of ‘sounding out’ and blending words. When I sat down with him and showed him the very first lesson of blending short vowel ‘a’ words, the light bulb went off. He caught on so fast that it even surprised me! You could see that the missing link had been discovered and it all made sense to him finally. By the end of the day we were going through the first short vowel ‘a’ book and his mother was brought to tears when she discovered this as she was picking him up from school. He announced “I can read! I can read!” and he really could.

When your child is first solidifying their phonics reading skills, it’s important to be consistent with their lessons. Everyone looks forward to summer break, but it’s important to do at least one phonics reading lesson per day with your child so that they don’t loose the foundation they’ve worked so hard to build during the school year.

I remember a student of mine that had learned to read short vowel words and beginning books during his kindergarten year, went home for summer break, came back to school in the fall and had forgotten almost everything! He knew the sounds of all the consonants and vowels, but had forgotten how to blend the sounds together to read. Thankfully it only took a few days for him to regain those reading skills!

The point is, even if you do something as small as having your child read one 8 page book a day or play ‘mystery box’, do something that will keep their skills fresh in their mind or maybe even build them up in preparation for the next school year!

An important thing to remember when working with your child is that pacing is key to the development of their reading skills. You have to adjust the rate that you teach them to take a much time as they need to master a skill or speed up as much as they need to stay interested and engaged. The good thing about phonics is that it is so sequential it makes it easy to accommodate to your child’s learning speed.

With that in mind, remember to give enough time to each lesson so that your child has a solid basis before moving on to the next lesson. The thing about phonics is every lesson builds from the one before it, so you want to make sure that every lesson’s foundation is solid before you move on from there.

Happy learning!

Here’s a fun phonics lesson/game to play with your child this weekend! It’s called the mystery box:

1)      Use a small gift box or a sack if no box is available.

2)      Choose any letter. For this example, I’ll use ‘c’.

3)      Put 5 or so objects starting with ‘c’ in the box. Try to make them small objects like a cotton ball, mini candy cane, a small cup, etc.

4)      Tell your child you made a mystery box and they have to close their eyes and reach in and guess what the objects are.

5)      Once they take out all the objects and tell you what they are, ask them what letter they all start with. Kids love this game and catch on fast! When they get to good at the game, you can have them prepare mystery boxes for you and play it where they get to take on the role as teacher and you are the student;)

Have fun with this reading game! Have any more ideas? Let me know below…

Here are some hard facts presented by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in its literary report of 2003:

1)   About one in 20 adults in the U.S. is not literate in English

2)   85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate

3)   More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate

4) One child in four grows up not learning how to read

5)  90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts

Scary stuff, huh? That’s why I think it is so important to take whatever steps necessary you need to in order to increase your children’s likelihood of academic success early on. Phonics has been proven time and again to be a helpful reading method to teach basic reading skills to all ages. As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Use what you know works!

*Thank you to http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html for the statistics.