[FrdmLvr]

I read “Why Johnny Can’t Read” and then taught my son and daughter to read when they were 4 or 5 using Sam Blumenfeld’s Alphaphonics. It was one of the best things I’d ever done as a parent, I believe. He’s a remarkable educator. I love his philosophy.

http://www.amazon.com/Alpha-Phonics-Beginning-Samuel-L-Blumenfeld/dp/0941995003/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1267225656&sr=1-1-fkmr1

[christianhomeschoolmommaof3]

We use Spell to Write and Read and we love it! I love Wanda Sanseri’s Oregon Senate Speech.
http://www.swrtraining.com/id27.html

[ExGeeEye]

"Why would you want a child to look at the word "cat" and say to herself, "cuh - aaa - tuh" and for "dog" say "duh - oww - guh."?

Because once the kid gets the hang of that (and a few other letters of our fine phonetic alphabet), she can come up on words like "catastrophic" and "dogmatism" and get them recognizably right the first time.

[Bernard Marx]

I'm thankful I grew up when phonics was still taught in public schools. That, plus a remarkable high school course in etymology, opened up an awesome range of the world's knowledge to me.

The education establishment's rejection of phonics has always seemed to me a glaring symbol of its general wrong-headedness. America has become in large part an illiterate society thanks to the "educators."

[InterceptPoint]

My view is that we are all sight readers except when we run into a word we don't recognize. When that happens we sound out the word to see if that helps. Some times it does, generally it doesn't.

But for a child reading their first book, sounding out a word works like MAGIC because the child finds he/she almost always knows the word after sounding it out. He/she memorizes that word and maybe never has to sound it out again. When you are learning to read this is the way to do it. You need very little help. Just give a kid the rules for sounding out words and hand them a pile of books with words that they will recognize once they pronounce them.

[I still care]

My child could not read until he was 12. He was in all the special reading programs for the district, and I was badgering the teachers. One of them said to me in exasperation, “You just have to accept your child will never read beyond a 4th grade level, at best!”

So I pulled him out of school, and began to homeschool. I was a pioneer at it, and took great grief.

I had him reading in a week with The Natural Way to Reading by Stevenson. Basically, it turned everything teachers believe inside out. For instance, sound words out starting at the INSIDE vowel (easier to meld the sounds - the first one says its name, the second must shut up. Use cards to cover the first letter of the word.). Start with long vowel words, not short ones (easier for kids to remember vowel sounds.) NO PICTURES. (Teachers say kids need them for context, and to guess - but we don’t want them to guess! We want them to read!).

Such simple concepts, but radically different than what the district used, and when we got results, the district kept telling me I was doing it all wrong! (But they were happy to see him reading.)

Now he reads at college level.

[SoftballMominVA]

My reading masters from UVA is based largely on the work of Flesch and Henderson (a later ground breaking pioneer)

A quirky bit of history. Henderson was scheduled to meet with Marie Clay from New Zealand to discuss his concerns with her new method of teaching reading. Unfortunately, two weeks before he was to go, he was diagnosed with cancer and never made the trip and later died from his cancer.

Not too long afterwards, Marie Clay released the “Whole Language” method, which has, IMO, done more damage to the process of teaching reading than any other philosophy.

What might have been huh?

[Marmolade]

bfl