[PUGACHEV]

I have mixed feelings about phonetics. I was educated by the nuns in the early ‘50, and, for some reason, they did not teach it. Instead, we learned to read “by sight”, that is, we were taught to recognize each word without analyzing it phonetically. To this day, I still remember the very first word we learned, “look”. See, the nun said, as she wrote it out on the blackboard, it has two eyes. The advantage was we mastered reading very quickly; the disadvantage was I have always had difficulty spelling.

[Marie]

I was taught phonics as a child, but I forgot most of what I’d learned over the years. As an adult, when I began homeschooling my own children, I relearned phonics and my own spelling, grammar and reading improved.

Go back, young man! Go through first grade phonics again. It’ll take you 30 minutes a day for a few months to see it again. Your world will open up.

Use Saxon. You’ll be amazed at how much sense there is in the English language.

[metmom]

Phonics is the BEST way to learn to read.

If you’ve ever watched the National Spelling Bee, you’ll see the kids using phonics and the language of origin to try to determine how to spell a word.

If you simply do memorization, you are dependent on memorizing every single word you know and if you don’t, you don’t have a clue how to pronounce it. Nor can you sound it out to have any idea how to spell it correctly.

With phonics, you simply sound out the word, knowing what sound each letter makes. It can be learned in less than 2 years in a school setting, at the first and second grade level. I know because we used Ron & Staff Phonics for our kids when we homeschooled them and it as for first and second grade and they learned it all.

And all are excellent spellers.