teaching phonics-letter sounds... what approach works best?

[eastkygal]

When I learned to read, I was taught "Letter People". I learned to recognize each letter and at the same time I was taught one sound that the letter made. After that was completed, we learned of the vowel sounds and some of the letter combinations like sh, ch, ph, etc.... Then, rhyming etc...

In my curriculum, there is not a focus on learning single letter sounds, but this year, all my DD1 would learn are the "hard" sounds like sh, ch, t, etc... The rest of the letter work is learning this is an "A" and here is how you write it etc... No sounds.

By the end of kindergarten we were learning to read Dick and Jane books, but I don't forsee any reading by the end of this year with Rod and Staff. I'm not worried about when to read per se as much as what is the best approach to teaching phonics. What has worked for your child? What is the least confusing?

[kittywitty]

I like the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I'm not as hardcore with repetition as they suggest, but we've tried tons of different things and it's the only thing that has consistently worked with all of my kids. They are poems and verses which my kids like from circle time, anyway, so it works out well.

[Mere]

I feel like I am continually singing the praises of 'Teach your child to read in 100 Easy Lessons' but here I am, doing it again (there have been a lot of reading threads lately!). Ds1 and I just completed this a few months ago, and he went from being able to identify *maybe* half the sounds of the alphabet letters to reading at a second grade level in about 9 months. No he's not any kind of genius and he was 5 - he had a very short attention span to boot.

The approach this book takes (and that's all it is - one book) is to teach the letters and their sounds in a particular progression, and as soon as they can get the child to read even one word with those letters, they do it. Then they do it again, and again, and again. The sounds they learn are cleverly reinforced over and over again so they cannot NOT learn them. But literally, they are introducing new letters/sounds even when the book is three-quarters the way done!

This method really worked amazingly well with ds. No, it is not snazzy looking (it's all black and white) and definitely, if the lessons took any longer than 10 minutes you'd probably lose the child. In fact, as ds got to be a better reader and the stories got longer, we did have to break the lessons up into two days. But still, the short and sweet, no frills method was highly effective for us!

[raelize]

i am using the ordinary parents guide and i like it. each lesson is like 15 minutes and dd is definatly remembering everything.

[eastkygal]

I really would rather not buy another book to teach phonics, but find a way to do it in with what we are already doing with letter recognition. Though, I might check out the ones mentioned here. I don't want to add more time to our school day at this point, or our budget.
I found starfall and it seems to go through sounds with letters as you learn to recognize them. I might just take that approach myself and see what happens.

[LoveOhm]

Hands down I LOVE the Letter Factory DVD check out the reviews on Amazon....

http://www.amazon.com/LeapFrog-Facto...3663369&sr=8-1