Home School Online

Today, Nancy Carter in the daily Old SchoolHouse email writes:

I can still remember the day about 10 years ago that I broke down crying in the paint aisle at Wal-Mart when I ran into another homeschool mom and we started discussing our frustrations with our 6 year-olds not reading. I mumbled things like “He seems to have it one day and then the next he doesn’t.”, “I’m not even sure he really knows all of his letter sounds.” 

She then writes about how she calmed down by focusing on perspective, value, and faith.  Good stuff. But I’d like to continue her article in a different direction.

There is a natural learning path that most children follow. Before reading, phonics. Before phonics, phonemic and phonological readiness which for most people, are just fancy ways of saying, pre-reading skills. Specifically, they are the listening skills so that kids can distinguish the sounds that make up words (eg light is different than fight, mat sounds different than gnat. These are distinctions that we need to learn to make).  And they are the conceptual skills to understand that words are made up of sounds.  M  plus “soft A” plus N = MAN: replace the M sound with a P sound and you have a PAN.  And it’s the understanding that stories are written in books which you can learn to decode but you must start with sounds that make up words and figure out how the letters make up the sounds.

It is only after the children have these skills that it’s worthwhile trying to teach them letters and phonics. Before that, it’s a weird and futile exercise for them. Frustrating too..  After they understand these pre-reading skills, they understand what they are working towards and the effort makes sense to them. In fact, it’s exciting!

Frankly, there are way too many parents and schools putting the cart ahead of the horse, pushing reading before the prereading skills are in place.  And worse than driving the mothers’ nuts, it doesn’t do much for the kids either. 

So I’d take the article towards making the point that in teaching, you need to understand what sequence makes sense. If the kids not getting it, think about why. What has been left out?  What skills will they need first?  And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, hop on the net and ask the question on your favorite homeschool forum, here’s mine (favorite homeschooling forum)

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