Years ago the National Right to Read Foundation tried to encourage American education policy and curriculum back toward simple phonics drilling and instruction. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, 44 sounds those letters make in the English language, and 70 common ways to spell those sounds. But I challenge you to answer honestly – did you know the English language was made up of 44 sounds? I was an English teacher and that factoid was never a part of my education while pursuing my license. Teaching young children how to spell sounds and decode sounds based on the letter combinations is called phonics instruction, and it’s not really done in a straightforward way anymore. As of right now – there’s no set nation-wide instruction on how to teach so kids learn to read. It\s often left up to teachers and parents. So I hope this helps you feel empowered to teach your children how to read!
Help Your Kids Learn to Read With this Primer
The National Right to Read Foundation doesn’t have an operating website anymore, but the information they created about Phonics instruction still exists and here’s the link to their Phonics Primer! It’s a free pdf for download and printing.
Step 1: Assemble your Materials. There’s a recommended list of materials in the primer, but I started just by printing out and laminating a plain text alphabet and flashcards of individual letters. Easy peasy!
Step 2: Practice the 5 short vowel sounds and the regular consonant sounds every day. Practice the sounds by drilling, which is showing the letter, saying the sound, and having them repeat the sound before moving on to the next letter. In a few months my son was doing this completely by himself!
Step 3: Drill 2-letter blends using short vowel sounds and consonant combinations!
Step 4: Once blending of two letters together is automatic, you move on to simple three letter blends – three letter words! Drill words until automatic!
Once your child can decode three letter words you have a lot of options of simple books to start reading with them, allowing them to do a lot of the reading to increase their confidence! The BOB Book series really consistently uses words kids with an understanding of phonics can decode.
Move on to Steps 5 – 12 (learning the other sounds and letter blends in the English language) at a good pace for you, Step 13 is when the Phonics Primer introduces decodable stories so if you’d like to stick to the Primer exactly download it here and print it out!