The A, B, C's Of Reading

Helping your child learn to read is a simple process once you have learned a few important principles.

We have outlined a few things that we think will help make this experience both enjoyable and effective.

• Phonics

Phonics is an instructional method for teaching a person to read English. This method teaches you to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters. For example, that "pat" is spelled with three letters, p, a, and t, each representing a sound. The student is then taught to blend the sounds together to make the spoken word "pat".

• Sight words (worked into the program and in the workbooks)

Sight Words are the words most frequently used that cannot be pronounced using phonics (e.g., you, do, who, said). There are approximately 100 of these words in the English language. These words require memorization.

• Alphabetic principle (spelling key is taught through out the program and in the workbooks)

The spelling system for a language such as Spanish is relatively simple because each letter nearly always has just one corresponding sound. English spelling is more complex because it attempts to represent 40+ sounds of the spoken language with an alphabet of only 26 letters. As a result two letters are often put together to make a distinct sound, such as "t" and "h", put next to each other (th) creates a whole new sound that is not represented by either "t" or "h". These sounds are called digraphs.

English is an accumulation of words from other languages throughout history, without changing the spelling of those words. As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of five languages (Old English, Old Norse, Norman French, Classical Latin and Greek). These overlapping spelling patterns mean that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. For example, the sound "a" as in bake can also be spelled, (ai as in maid) (ay as in may) (eigh as in eight) and (ey as in they). Say the words, maid, may, eight and they, you can hear the "a" sound in each word, yet each word is spelled differently.