How to Teach Children to read.

 The Phonics method works.  We teach the children the sounds of each letter.  This is not hard after the children learn to sing the Alphabet Song in kindergarten.  And learn the rules about long and short vowels.  And learn the more common digraphs like “th”.  Teach them that long words can be broken down into syllables. Each syllable starts with a consonant, has a vowel in the middle and a consonant on the end.  Sound out the syllables, one by one, and then say them in order and you have the word.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, that and the other stuff is probably less than 50 things the child has to learn by heart.  And with them, the child is equipped to handle new words, something that happens a lot when the child is just learning to read.

 

The Whole Word method is popular with Ed majors, but it does not work.  It cannot be taught.  The child is taught to look at the whole word.  If he/she is lucky, the mind will recognize the word and the child will know how to pronounce the word, what it means, connotations and denotations.  If the mind fails to recognize the whole word, the child is out of luck, the word is meaningless.  Whole word requires the child to learn by heart a lot more than just 26 letters and some other stuff.  The King James Bible is noted for restricting itself to a vocabulary of only 850 words.  Whole word requires memorizing at least 850 words and probably a lot more.  That is a lot harder for a child to do than Phonics. 

 

   Whole Word is what skilled readers do.  I picked it up by fourth grade.  It just came to me after doing some reading.  Some people, like my best friend, don’t have it by high school.  Best friend was plenty smart, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and went to work computing the intensity of the sound fields around the Saturn V engines.  NASA wanted to know if the sound from 27 rocket engines, all firing at once, would be enough to crack the concrete on the launching site.  Senior year in high school, best friend went out for tutoring in reading, and came back able to read Whole Word method.  He was lucky, and bright, and supported by loving parents, and attending a top notch private high school with me.