Teaching reading and spelling can be a bit scary when we’re first starting our homeschool journey. Enormous emphasis is put on these subjects for young elementary kids. It’s certainly easy to feel like we’re not up to the challenge. One of the first decisions we have to make is whether or not to follow many schools’ lead and teach our kids to read based on the whole word method. Or should we break with that approach and go down the road of learning phonics rules?
What is a Sight Word?
Many schools use sight words as a major component for teaching students how to read. This is also known as the Whole Word Method which teaches children to memorize the words frequently used in children’s books instead of teaching them to sound out the words phonetically. The claim is that many of these words do not follow phonetic rules and, therefore, must be memorized. However, many sight words actually DO follow phonics rules that allow kids to sound them out.
Edward Dolce created the Dolce Word List in 1938. It has 220 words that were commonly used in children’s literature. He split this list of words into 5 grade levels spanning pre-k through 3rd grade. This word list is still used in many schools today. Children are still expected to memorize these words by sight instead of learning the phonics rules that many of them follow.
Related Post – Different Approaches to a Spelling List
Learning to Read with Phonics Rules
Reading and spelling can also be taught using phonics rules. Children are taught the sounds of letters (and letter teams) and how they sometimes change based on different rules. These rules guide the kids in sounding out the sounds that make up words.
With reading, kids are breaking apart, or decoding words. With spelling, kids are putting together, or encoding words. Once kids learn the rules, they can apply them to most other words that they’ll encounter. Instead of memorizing a list of high frequency sight words, they’ll be able to sound out many other related words using phonics rules.
Some common phonetic rules that enable kids to sound out many words…
- vowels in closed syllables are usually short
- vowels in open syllables are usually long
- consonant blends
- beginning and ending blends
- jobs of silent E
- syllable division rules
- I and O are often long before two consonants
- sounds of vowel teams
Related Post – When to Teach Sight Words with Phonics
Teach Reading and Spelling with Phonics Rules or Sight Words?
We started homeschooling when my oldest was entering kindergarten, so teaching her to read was at the top of my to-do list for that year. I knew that schools used sight words to teach kids to read. Even though we’d decided to homeschool, breaking away from such an ingrained way of teaching reading and spelling was a very difficult decision – especially for a new homeschooler. I didn’t want to mess this up!
I decided to try a phonics based reading program with the understanding that I could always switch to the whole word approach. Teaching phonetic rules just seemed to make sense even if I wasn’t entirely confident in that decision at the time. It was worth trying.
Fast forward 6 years later, I am now a firm believer in the power of learning the phonetic rules! This is a system that sets kids up for successfully learning to read and spell far beyond the high frequency words. I now understand that most of the 220 words in the Dolce Sight Word list actually follow phonetic rules. These are not words that just have to be memorized. All About Learning Press has a great video that breaks down the Dolce Sight Word list compared to phonetic rules. Only 20 words are left on the list that have to be memorized by students.
Related Post – How to Organize All About Reading
Would you rather teach your kids to memorize 220 sight words or just 20? Would you rather give them the tools to sound out many more words that aren’t on that list? Those tools are the rules which kids will learn when using phonetic based reading and spelling programs. It’s okay to break from how schools teach young kids to read and spell. It may be a hard decision, but it’s definitely worth considering. This will set your kids up for successfully learning to read and spell.
Related Posts
How to Organize All About Reading
How to Choose a Homeschool Curriculum
[…] Related Post: Using Phonics Rules or Sight Words? […]