Considering the sheer volume of available choices, phonics home school products have to be one of the most popular purchases that home school parents make! If you browse catalogs or the vendor booths at home school conventions, you’ll agree. Games. Readers. Flashcards. Songs. Phonics product after phonics product woo homeschool parents with tempting promises like these:

“provide the skills for children to become lifelong readers”

“a proven system that teaches children to read”

“develop readers who can get meaning from print”

Rainbow Resource Center carries an astounding 410 different phonics products! Even respected mathematics giant, Saxon Publishers, offers two different phonics programs. According to economic theory, demand drives the supply, so home school parents must believe that phonics programs are necessary, but is this belief founded in reality?

For over a century, American educators have debated the usefulness of phonics instruction in teaching reading. Horace Mann introduced the “look-say” method where a child memorizes sight words instead of sounding out the letters. My own public school education in the 1960s utilized the famous look-say readers, “Dick and Jane” and their dog, Spot. I still remember reading “See Spot. See Spot run.” Sight reading was the norm, but gratefully, my mother taught me how to sound out the letters and letter blends at home during our story time so that I became a proficient reader despite my public school education.

In 1955, reading and writing expert, Rudolf Flesch published a controversial book entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (later revised in 1981 in “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read”) in which he proposed that phonics instruction was the missing link to American literacy. Flesch was considered a pariah and was ridiculed by the education establishment.

I don’t know what method the public schools in your neighborhood are using to teach reading, but here in Indianapolis, my next door neighbors are still bringing home sight words to memorize for weekly spelling exams; when their rising 3^rd grader still couldn’t read after 2 years of instruction, the parents hired a reading tutor in exasperation! In 1990 and 1997, the United States Congress commissioned studies to determine why public school kids couldn’t read. Both reports concluded that phonics instruction was a necessary component of teaching reading and learning to spell. Nearly 30 years after the first Congressional study, my local public school is still using the ineffective “look-say” method!

Instruction in phonics involves teaching kids to pronounce the sounds of letters first then the sounds of letter blends. Once the child knows how to pronounce the letters and the blends, he can effectively “sound out” any combination of single-syllable words and eventually move on to words with multiple syllables. In effect, phonics instruction teaches the alphabetic code, and once children know this code, they can effectively decode unknown words. For example, the child who learns the high frequency anchors (also known as roots or “rimes” by linguists) can change the first letter and build countless new words (the anchor “-ook” can become book, look, cook, took, etc.)

So, it looks like all those homeschool parents purchasing phonics materials know something that public school parents don’t know: phonics instruction is a necessary component of learning how to read. (Surprise, surprise!) One caution though…since the classical Christian education emphasizes literature over manufactured “readers” (those books that are in the phonics packages that are scripted around repeating certain letters and letter blends), use phonics instruction as a supplement to “living books.” Don’t substitute the phonics readers for real books. The kids will be bored and won’t catch the excitement of a well-written story. And please don’t start with flashcards and rote memorization drills. Start reading daily with young children and only introduce phonics after you’ve instilled a love for the written word!

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Have you been enjoying this series on step 1 of the Trivium, “Learning the Language?” Click on the links below to read the previous posts:

Learning the Language through Listening

 

Reading Aloud: the Key to Language Development

 

What is the Purpose of Reading?

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I’ve got lots more to share on the subject of teaching reading, but for now, I will move on to my final post in this series which will be on the importance of writing in learning the native language.

On a housekeeping note, as I look back over these posts, I notice that I am writing longer and longer posts. Would you mind telling me through the comments section whether my post length is too long, too short, or just right? I want to value your time, so please let me know if I need to write shorter posts. Thanks!

 

Tags: home school, homeschool, learning how to read, look-see method, phonics, teaching reading