I've loved reading for as long as I can remember, and I attribute that 100% to the fact that I had lots of early exposure to wonderful stories, and that my grandmother encouraged my mom to teach me with a phonics-based approach (I can't recall if I've ever mentioned on this blog that I was homeschooled K-8. Well, I was and I loved it, but that's a story for another day!).
So needless to say, when it comes to teaching kids to read, I'm pretty passionate about phonics, and about making reading fun and interesting for our budding readers.
(also visit my Early Readers Pinterest Board and Homeschool Phonics Board - I update them regularly with new decodable books, activities, and worksheets I've found!)
Learning to Read for Comprehension
In order to understand what they're reading, our kids need to be able to glean meaning from the letters they are reading. To comprehend what they read, have to be able to:
(1) sound out a word, and
(2) comprehend the meaning of the word in the given context
Reading Isn't a Natural Process
The human brain is not designed for reading. From a very early age we soak up knowledge about the world through the things we see and the things we hear. But our brains aren't pre-wired to connect the words we hear to written language. Reading takes work.
Step One: Phonics - Decoding Words
In order to decode written language, kids must be able to look at a word and sound it out. In theory, we could ask kids to memorize all the tens of thousands of words in the English language as sight words. However that would be an extremely tedious and painful process. Thankfully, this level of mind-numbing memorization is totally unnecessary. English is an alphabetic language with 44 sounds (known in the reading science world as "phonemes").
This means that rather than teaching kids to memorize an endless list of words, we can instead teach them using Phonics -- that is to say, by teaching them a relatively short list of letter-sound relationships. For example, we teach them that a printed "s" says "ssss" and "t says tttt." In this way, once they've learned all the letter-sound relationships and how they blend to form words, kids will be able to decode new words on their own.
As kids build their phonics skills, focusing on the letter-sound links helps rebuilding the brain in such a way that words map into kids' long term memory, freeing their mental capacity up to focus on reading comprehension.
Unsurprisingly, as the research has now overwhelmingly shown, a systematic Phonics-Based approach to reading is critical to ensuring that kids become good readers.
Step Two: Comprehension - Linking to Meaning From a Knowledge Base
Decoding words is only the first step in learning to read. Once a child can successfully sound out words and sentences and paragraphs, they need to be able to understand what they're reading. Reading Comprehension is important.
When students have good background knowledge about the concepts which they are reading, they are able to tap into that pre-existing knowledge to make sense of the text.
For example, consider the word: CAT
A child who sounded out CAT would immediately have a light-bulb "Aha!" moment as their brain tapped into all of their existing knowledge about the concept of cats. Fluffy cats, cuddly cats, orange cats, black cats, sneaky cats. Cat food. Cats on the prowl. Their parents have told them stories about cats, they've seen videos of cats, they may even have a cat of their own. all these things add up to a rich knowledge base which they can draw on to assign meaning to the printed word "CAT."
Now consider the word: AFT
It's a deceptively simple word. AFT contains the same amount of letters as the word CAT, and they are all short vowels and hard consonants. But unless a child has grown up on and around sailing ships, they're not going to have an "Aha" moment when reading this word. It's just going to be a jumble of sounds. It's not a part of their vocabulary.
The knowledge-base that kids bring into a text matters.
So does context. Reading comprehension can't be taught simply as a set of skills or strategies that can be applied to any text. This is what Balanced Literacy advocates have been doing for years, and it isn't effective, because context matters.
Consider the following word: TAP
It's another deceptively simple word. Unfortunately, it has totally different meanings when used in different contexts, sometimes metaphorically. Someone might tap on a door, do tap across the dance floor, tap into a tree for syrup, tap someone to lead a committee, open a tap to get water, or tap a phone line. That's a lot of meanings for one word. And unfortunately? This isn't an isolated phenomenon. Think about the word "net" as it applies to fishing, to business, to soccer. The word "bar" and its many many variants in the context of law, security, gymnastics, metalworking, textile patterns, restaurants, and music. The word "bat" is going to mean something very different to a biologist as it is to a baseball-player.
Context matters.
Many students are entering high school and college unprepared for STEM, Economics, and Social Sciences heavy course curriculum. This is why it's imperative to start building kids' knowledge base early on. Without the background knowledge of the content and core vocabulary, for them, the words will remain a mystery.
More on learning to read:
Learning to Read, A Primer: Part 1 || Part 2
How Kids Learn to Read
At a Loss For Words - APM Podcast with Emily Hanford
Why Reading Science Matters - BrainScience Podcast
Reading 101 - Reading Rockets
The Trouble with the Common Word Recognition Strategies
Further Reading About Phonics
Phonics is a tool for teaching reading. It helps students the link the different sounds in speech to the letters and letter groups we use to represent those sounds in written language.
Step One: Phonological Awareness - The Measured Mom
Before kids can learn to read, they have to understand that each sentence in our spoken language is made up of individual words, and each word can be broken up into syllables and further broken down into distinct speech sounds (also known as phonemes). The Measured Mom explains this beautifully on her website, and has a ton of other resources to boot.
Phonics Skills List - This Reading Mama
This Reading Mama page gives you a basic overview of what phonics is, as well as links to so many great resources on her site.
Phonics: Your Questions Answered - The Kindergarten Connection
A quick overview of phonics!
Teaching Reading the Right Way - A Teachable Teacher
A Teachable Teacher uses a great learning-to-drive analogy to illustrate how to build confidence by providing a safe foundation of 'parking-lot' phonics sound skills, then gradually easing out into the practice sentence neighborhood before heading onto the reading highway!
Why Phonics?
Phonics forms the essential link between letter shapes and the sounds and meaning embedded in those letter shapes. Without phonics skills, kids can't sound out words. If they can't sound out words, they don't know what word they are reading. In absence of phonics, they'll only glean meaning from written langage by resorting to crutch strategies: memorizing thousands and thousands of whole words, and by guessing unfamiliar words using picture clues and story context. Without phonics tools in their back pockets, reading can quickly become overwhelming for kids. Why set them up for failure? Phonics is best taught straight away up-front.
So What's The Debate?
Whether, how, and to what extent phonics should be taught as a core reading strategy in schools has been hotly debated. Phonics advocates argue for an early focus on sounding out words. Critics of the phonics approach point out that even when students can sound out a word, they still might not know its meaning. Hence they'll need other tools if they want to expand their vocabulary. Over the past decades, schools have swung from strongly Phonics-Focused instruction to strongly "Whole-Language" approaches that use context to guess words. In that time, kids have suffered and literacy rates have plummeted.
Read more about the Phonics-Whole Language debate here:
Ending the Reading Wars (this is a 2018 academic journal article and an absolutely fabulous overview of so much of the latest research. It's long, but do take the time to read through it!) || How I Taught My Kid to Read - The Atlantic || At a Loss For Words: How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to Be Poor Readers || The Australian Debate on How To Teach Kids to Read || A Case for Why Both Sides in the Reading Wars Debate are Wrong (they propose a third way that is frankly quite confusing and I can't imagine teaching it, but this is an intriguing article) ||
Now, many schools employ a hybrid method which pulls from both Phonics and Whole-Language approaches.
How Do You Teach Phonics?
There is no single right or wrong way to teach phonics as a core reading strategy. The most important thing is to include it in your reading program. Literacy rates plummeted in the US, UK, and Australia after schools moved away from a phonics-integrating approach. Thankfully many schools are now re-integrating phonics as a core reading strategy!
But which letter sounds do you teach in what order? There are many approaches and each program will have its own sequence of introducing letters sounds, but the general rule is to begin with short vowels and hard consonants ... introducing a few letters and their sounds at a time for a week or two or three until students have mastered them (... and importantly, do NOT teach student letter names until later, as trying to match both sound and name to a letter at once can be very confusing *shakes fist at ABC song* ... side-story: I learned a different ABC song than the old tired standard-fare, one that incorporated the letter sounds! I'll have to see if I can find it replicated somewhere).
FREE PHONICS PROGRAMS AND TIPS
Phonics Skills List - This Reading Mama
How do you teach phonics to kids, and in what order? This Reading Mama has great approach to get you started from preschool through second grade, and amazing free resources on her site.
Stairway to Reading
A free phonics based program
Progressive Phonics
A free phonics program
Helping Your Child Learn to Read: A Brochure for Parents
A Teachable Teacher provides some great tips for parents whose children are being taught in a classroom but still want to support their child's reading journey.
PAID PROGRAMS
Get Reading Right Program
This is a full suite synthetic phonics program designed by Australian teachers. They have both paid and free resources and overviews available on their site to help you teach the letter sounds and "camera words" (irregular words that can't be sounded out phonetically). This is their Sequence at a Glance and here are their steps: (1) Basic Code & Basic Camera Words (2) Advanced Code & Advanced Camera Words (3) Complete the Code
Jolly Phonics
This is one of the oldest, most established phonics programs. They offer a number of paid and free resources for a full-fledged 7-year phonics, grammar, and literacy programme. Here are their teaching steps.
Sounds-Write Phonics
This is another evidence-based phonics programme.
Phonics Readers & Activities
Once kids can readily identify several letters and their sounds, it's so important for them to gain confidence and excitement by starting to read words, then sentences, then longer passages and stories. But not all early readers are designed with phonics or K-2 students in mind, and sadly, this is the case for nearly all the so-called early reader books you'll find at your local library. As The Unlikely Homeschooler puts it in her post about choosing the right reader, most mainstream "learn to read" books are too long, and will produce nothing but failure and frustration for a child who hasn't mastered all of the letter sounds and their spellings., This, depending on the child, could take months or years of instruction.
So hang on, are we supposed to wait and tell our kids "sorry, you can't read real stories and books yet" while they practice phonics flash cards and memorization for two years??
Not at all. You just need to find the right, phonics-based reader to meet your child where they are at. readers which use primarily the letter sounds and sight words they've already mastered. And I personally believe that phonics-based texts texts don't have to be boring or dull. If well designed they can be wonderfully rich, rewarding, and tell an amazing story. More on that later. :o)
Finding these types of books is easier said than done, but there are resources out there!
First, you'll need to know where your child is at in terms of the phonics sequence of teaching phonemes (letter sounds) and sight words (aka camera words or tricky words). If you're not teaching your kiddo yourself, you'll probably need to ask your child's teacher.
Next, look for books that your child can decode because they use primarily those sounds and sight words your child has already mastered. In the early stages of instruction, phonics-based readers will focus on a particular vowel family. For example, a book may focus on words with the Short A sound, or on the Long E sound family in its various spellings (ee, ea, ie, -y etc). Early on, other phonics readers might hone in on CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant ... for example CAT, PIG, MOP), or CCVC words (e.g. SPIN, TRAP, PLUG). Once students have practiced with these, they can move on towards more complex stories and readers, so long as they know many of the letter sounds and/or sight words in them.
Short A Activities and Resources - Miss Giraffe's Class
Miss Giraffe shares her ideas, activities, and reading passages for teaching phonics sounds. Though the examples are for Short A, they can be adapted for any of the sounds.
SPELD Phonics Books
This is an AMAZING (and extremely generous) free resource that provides books and worksheets for the ENTIRE sequence of Jolly Phonics. Not to be missed.
130 Free Printable Phonics Books - The Measured Mom
She has sets for the short and long vowels, and more complex letter combinations. Also see her Free Printables for Early Reading.
The Ultimate List of Free Phonics Activities - This Reading Mama
A list of links to a slew of great resources around the web.
Phonics Alphabet Songs Playlist: Preschool & Kindergarten
I've created a YouTube Playlist of letter-sound alphabet songs to help your child get started associating those letter shapes to letter sounds!
Free Printable Phonics CVCe Reading Passages - A Teachable Teacher
(You can find the resource linked near the bottom of the page). She has a ton of other great bundles too if you sign up for her newsletter.
Free Printable Emergent Readers - Homeschool Giveaways
There are links to nearly 200 emergent readers on this page! Not all of them are phonics-based, so you'll want to double check.
Decodable Texts - The First Grade Roundup
A few free and a few paid decodable texts. These passages are shorter than full stories, but a great way to practice and build confidence.
Fluency Passages for Early Readers - The Kindergarten Connection
23 CVC and CVCe word families included in this paid resource.
The Literacy Nest
This is a paid resource, but she has decodable stories for the Orton-Gillingham sequence of phonics instruction.
The Best in Emergent Readers - The Unlikely Homeschool
You'll need to pay for some of these hardcopy books, and to be honest some may be hard to find, but they all follow a phonics-based sequence. Here are some more published phonics readers over at Imagination Soup.
Teachers Pay Teachers
This website is a treasure trove of resources. Check out the Phonics Bundles from A Teachable Teacher and lots more.
Reading Fluency
10 Ways to Improve Reading Fluency - The Measured Mom
Reading Comprehension
So what do you do when your child gets to a word they don't know?
Either your child:
(A) can't properly sound out the word, or
(B) they can sound it out, but they don't know what it means
Case A is pretty straightforward. If your child can't sound out the word, they haven't got the phonics tools they need to sound it out. Before they can be expected to master this word, they need to master the phonics underlying it, or, if it's an irregular sight word, memorize it outright.
Case B gets more complicated. Unfortunately the solution is not what has been advocated in a so-called "Balanced Literacy" approach. For years, many schools have employed what is called "Balanced Literacy" which largely teaches reading comprehension as a set of skills or strategies to help students guess new words that they may stumble upon when reading. This is also called 3 cueing or MSV (Meaning, Syntax, and Visual cues). The problem? These approaches don't work. They are the approaches to reading that poor readers use to guess words rather than learning how to read properly, efficiently and well. These approaches aren't supported by the reading research.
Links coming soon!
....
~ Carissa
So needless to say, when it comes to teaching kids to read, I'm pretty passionate about phonics, and about making reading fun and interesting for our budding readers.
(also visit my Early Readers Pinterest Board and Homeschool Phonics Board - I update them regularly with new decodable books, activities, and worksheets I've found!)
Learning to Read for Comprehension
In order to understand what they're reading, our kids need to be able to glean meaning from the letters they are reading. To comprehend what they read, have to be able to:
(1) sound out a word, and
(2) comprehend the meaning of the word in the given context
Reading Isn't a Natural Process
The human brain is not designed for reading. From a very early age we soak up knowledge about the world through the things we see and the things we hear. But our brains aren't pre-wired to connect the words we hear to written language. Reading takes work.
Step One: Phonics - Decoding Words
In order to decode written language, kids must be able to look at a word and sound it out. In theory, we could ask kids to memorize all the tens of thousands of words in the English language as sight words. However that would be an extremely tedious and painful process. Thankfully, this level of mind-numbing memorization is totally unnecessary. English is an alphabetic language with 44 sounds (known in the reading science world as "phonemes").
This means that rather than teaching kids to memorize an endless list of words, we can instead teach them using Phonics -- that is to say, by teaching them a relatively short list of letter-sound relationships. For example, we teach them that a printed "s" says "ssss" and "t says tttt." In this way, once they've learned all the letter-sound relationships and how they blend to form words, kids will be able to decode new words on their own.
As kids build their phonics skills, focusing on the letter-sound links helps rebuilding the brain in such a way that words map into kids' long term memory, freeing their mental capacity up to focus on reading comprehension.
Unsurprisingly, as the research has now overwhelmingly shown, a systematic Phonics-Based approach to reading is critical to ensuring that kids become good readers.
Step Two: Comprehension - Linking to Meaning From a Knowledge Base
Decoding words is only the first step in learning to read. Once a child can successfully sound out words and sentences and paragraphs, they need to be able to understand what they're reading. Reading Comprehension is important.
When students have good background knowledge about the concepts which they are reading, they are able to tap into that pre-existing knowledge to make sense of the text.
For example, consider the word: CAT
A child who sounded out CAT would immediately have a light-bulb "Aha!" moment as their brain tapped into all of their existing knowledge about the concept of cats. Fluffy cats, cuddly cats, orange cats, black cats, sneaky cats. Cat food. Cats on the prowl. Their parents have told them stories about cats, they've seen videos of cats, they may even have a cat of their own. all these things add up to a rich knowledge base which they can draw on to assign meaning to the printed word "CAT."
Now consider the word: AFT
It's a deceptively simple word. AFT contains the same amount of letters as the word CAT, and they are all short vowels and hard consonants. But unless a child has grown up on and around sailing ships, they're not going to have an "Aha" moment when reading this word. It's just going to be a jumble of sounds. It's not a part of their vocabulary.
The knowledge-base that kids bring into a text matters.
So does context. Reading comprehension can't be taught simply as a set of skills or strategies that can be applied to any text. This is what Balanced Literacy advocates have been doing for years, and it isn't effective, because context matters.
Consider the following word: TAP
It's another deceptively simple word. Unfortunately, it has totally different meanings when used in different contexts, sometimes metaphorically. Someone might tap on a door, do tap across the dance floor, tap into a tree for syrup, tap someone to lead a committee, open a tap to get water, or tap a phone line. That's a lot of meanings for one word. And unfortunately? This isn't an isolated phenomenon. Think about the word "net" as it applies to fishing, to business, to soccer. The word "bar" and its many many variants in the context of law, security, gymnastics, metalworking, textile patterns, restaurants, and music. The word "bat" is going to mean something very different to a biologist as it is to a baseball-player.
Context matters.
Many students are entering high school and college unprepared for STEM, Economics, and Social Sciences heavy course curriculum. This is why it's imperative to start building kids' knowledge base early on. Without the background knowledge of the content and core vocabulary, for them, the words will remain a mystery.
More on learning to read:
Learning to Read, A Primer: Part 1 || Part 2
How Kids Learn to Read
At a Loss For Words - APM Podcast with Emily Hanford
Why Reading Science Matters - BrainScience Podcast
Reading 101 - Reading Rockets
The Trouble with the Common Word Recognition Strategies
Further Reading About Phonics
Phonics is a tool for teaching reading. It helps students the link the different sounds in speech to the letters and letter groups we use to represent those sounds in written language.
Step One: Phonological Awareness - The Measured Mom
Before kids can learn to read, they have to understand that each sentence in our spoken language is made up of individual words, and each word can be broken up into syllables and further broken down into distinct speech sounds (also known as phonemes). The Measured Mom explains this beautifully on her website, and has a ton of other resources to boot.
Phonics Skills List - This Reading Mama
This Reading Mama page gives you a basic overview of what phonics is, as well as links to so many great resources on her site.
Phonics: Your Questions Answered - The Kindergarten Connection
A quick overview of phonics!
Teaching Reading the Right Way - A Teachable Teacher
A Teachable Teacher uses a great learning-to-drive analogy to illustrate how to build confidence by providing a safe foundation of 'parking-lot' phonics sound skills, then gradually easing out into the practice sentence neighborhood before heading onto the reading highway!
Why Phonics?
Phonics forms the essential link between letter shapes and the sounds and meaning embedded in those letter shapes. Without phonics skills, kids can't sound out words. If they can't sound out words, they don't know what word they are reading. In absence of phonics, they'll only glean meaning from written langage by resorting to crutch strategies: memorizing thousands and thousands of whole words, and by guessing unfamiliar words using picture clues and story context. Without phonics tools in their back pockets, reading can quickly become overwhelming for kids. Why set them up for failure? Phonics is best taught straight away up-front.
So What's The Debate?
Whether, how, and to what extent phonics should be taught as a core reading strategy in schools has been hotly debated. Phonics advocates argue for an early focus on sounding out words. Critics of the phonics approach point out that even when students can sound out a word, they still might not know its meaning. Hence they'll need other tools if they want to expand their vocabulary. Over the past decades, schools have swung from strongly Phonics-Focused instruction to strongly "Whole-Language" approaches that use context to guess words. In that time, kids have suffered and literacy rates have plummeted.
Read more about the Phonics-Whole Language debate here:
Ending the Reading Wars (this is a 2018 academic journal article and an absolutely fabulous overview of so much of the latest research. It's long, but do take the time to read through it!) || How I Taught My Kid to Read - The Atlantic || At a Loss For Words: How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to Be Poor Readers || The Australian Debate on How To Teach Kids to Read || A Case for Why Both Sides in the Reading Wars Debate are Wrong (they propose a third way that is frankly quite confusing and I can't imagine teaching it, but this is an intriguing article) ||
Now, many schools employ a hybrid method which pulls from both Phonics and Whole-Language approaches.
How Do You Teach Phonics?
There is no single right or wrong way to teach phonics as a core reading strategy. The most important thing is to include it in your reading program. Literacy rates plummeted in the US, UK, and Australia after schools moved away from a phonics-integrating approach. Thankfully many schools are now re-integrating phonics as a core reading strategy!
But which letter sounds do you teach in what order? There are many approaches and each program will have its own sequence of introducing letters sounds, but the general rule is to begin with short vowels and hard consonants ... introducing a few letters and their sounds at a time for a week or two or three until students have mastered them (... and importantly, do NOT teach student letter names until later, as trying to match both sound and name to a letter at once can be very confusing *shakes fist at ABC song* ... side-story: I learned a different ABC song than the old tired standard-fare, one that incorporated the letter sounds! I'll have to see if I can find it replicated somewhere).
FREE PHONICS PROGRAMS AND TIPS
Phonics Skills List - This Reading Mama
How do you teach phonics to kids, and in what order? This Reading Mama has great approach to get you started from preschool through second grade, and amazing free resources on her site.
Stairway to Reading
A free phonics based program
Progressive Phonics
A free phonics program
Helping Your Child Learn to Read: A Brochure for Parents
A Teachable Teacher provides some great tips for parents whose children are being taught in a classroom but still want to support their child's reading journey.
PAID PROGRAMS
Get Reading Right Program
This is a full suite synthetic phonics program designed by Australian teachers. They have both paid and free resources and overviews available on their site to help you teach the letter sounds and "camera words" (irregular words that can't be sounded out phonetically). This is their Sequence at a Glance and here are their steps: (1) Basic Code & Basic Camera Words (2) Advanced Code & Advanced Camera Words (3) Complete the Code
Jolly Phonics
This is one of the oldest, most established phonics programs. They offer a number of paid and free resources for a full-fledged 7-year phonics, grammar, and literacy programme. Here are their teaching steps.
Sounds-Write Phonics
This is another evidence-based phonics programme.
Phonics Readers & Activities
Once kids can readily identify several letters and their sounds, it's so important for them to gain confidence and excitement by starting to read words, then sentences, then longer passages and stories. But not all early readers are designed with phonics or K-2 students in mind, and sadly, this is the case for nearly all the so-called early reader books you'll find at your local library. As The Unlikely Homeschooler puts it in her post about choosing the right reader, most mainstream "learn to read" books are too long, and will produce nothing but failure and frustration for a child who hasn't mastered all of the letter sounds and their spellings., This, depending on the child, could take months or years of instruction.
So hang on, are we supposed to wait and tell our kids "sorry, you can't read real stories and books yet" while they practice phonics flash cards and memorization for two years??
Not at all. You just need to find the right, phonics-based reader to meet your child where they are at. readers which use primarily the letter sounds and sight words they've already mastered. And I personally believe that phonics-based texts texts don't have to be boring or dull. If well designed they can be wonderfully rich, rewarding, and tell an amazing story. More on that later. :o)
Finding these types of books is easier said than done, but there are resources out there!
First, you'll need to know where your child is at in terms of the phonics sequence of teaching phonemes (letter sounds) and sight words (aka camera words or tricky words). If you're not teaching your kiddo yourself, you'll probably need to ask your child's teacher.
Next, look for books that your child can decode because they use primarily those sounds and sight words your child has already mastered. In the early stages of instruction, phonics-based readers will focus on a particular vowel family. For example, a book may focus on words with the Short A sound, or on the Long E sound family in its various spellings (ee, ea, ie, -y etc). Early on, other phonics readers might hone in on CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant ... for example CAT, PIG, MOP), or CCVC words (e.g. SPIN, TRAP, PLUG). Once students have practiced with these, they can move on towards more complex stories and readers, so long as they know many of the letter sounds and/or sight words in them.
Short A Activities and Resources - Miss Giraffe's Class
Miss Giraffe shares her ideas, activities, and reading passages for teaching phonics sounds. Though the examples are for Short A, they can be adapted for any of the sounds.
SPELD Phonics Books
This is an AMAZING (and extremely generous) free resource that provides books and worksheets for the ENTIRE sequence of Jolly Phonics. Not to be missed.
130 Free Printable Phonics Books - The Measured Mom
She has sets for the short and long vowels, and more complex letter combinations. Also see her Free Printables for Early Reading.
The Ultimate List of Free Phonics Activities - This Reading Mama
A list of links to a slew of great resources around the web.
Phonics Alphabet Songs Playlist: Preschool & Kindergarten
I've created a YouTube Playlist of letter-sound alphabet songs to help your child get started associating those letter shapes to letter sounds!
Free Printable Phonics CVCe Reading Passages - A Teachable Teacher
(You can find the resource linked near the bottom of the page). She has a ton of other great bundles too if you sign up for her newsletter.
Free Printable Emergent Readers - Homeschool Giveaways
There are links to nearly 200 emergent readers on this page! Not all of them are phonics-based, so you'll want to double check.
Decodable Texts - The First Grade Roundup
A few free and a few paid decodable texts. These passages are shorter than full stories, but a great way to practice and build confidence.
Fluency Passages for Early Readers - The Kindergarten Connection
23 CVC and CVCe word families included in this paid resource.
The Literacy Nest
This is a paid resource, but she has decodable stories for the Orton-Gillingham sequence of phonics instruction.
The Best in Emergent Readers - The Unlikely Homeschool
You'll need to pay for some of these hardcopy books, and to be honest some may be hard to find, but they all follow a phonics-based sequence. Here are some more published phonics readers over at Imagination Soup.
Teachers Pay Teachers
This website is a treasure trove of resources. Check out the Phonics Bundles from A Teachable Teacher and lots more.
Reading Fluency
10 Ways to Improve Reading Fluency - The Measured Mom
Reading Comprehension
So what do you do when your child gets to a word they don't know?
Either your child:
(A) can't properly sound out the word, or
(B) they can sound it out, but they don't know what it means
Case A is pretty straightforward. If your child can't sound out the word, they haven't got the phonics tools they need to sound it out. Before they can be expected to master this word, they need to master the phonics underlying it, or, if it's an irregular sight word, memorize it outright.
Case B gets more complicated. Unfortunately the solution is not what has been advocated in a so-called "Balanced Literacy" approach. For years, many schools have employed what is called "Balanced Literacy" which largely teaches reading comprehension as a set of skills or strategies to help students guess new words that they may stumble upon when reading. This is also called 3 cueing or MSV (Meaning, Syntax, and Visual cues). The problem? These approaches don't work. They are the approaches to reading that poor readers use to guess words rather than learning how to read properly, efficiently and well. These approaches aren't supported by the reading research.
Links coming soon!
....
~ Carissa
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