Considering the sheer volume of available choices, phonics homeschool products have to be one of the most popular purchases that homeschool parents make! If you browse catalogs or the vendor booths at homeschool 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 homeschool 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 3rd grader still couldn’t read after two 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!
Homeschool instruction in phonics involves teaching the child 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 classical education emphasizes literature over manufactured “readers” (those books that are in the phonics products 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. Make it a daily homeschool ritual to read with young children and only introduce phonics instruction after you’ve instilled a love for the written word!