Over the last few weeks, I have been working with my four and a half-year-old daughter on reading. I have started to observe the steps she is taking to becoming an independent reader and thought I would share these with my blog readers.

 

Her first reading steps were:

1. Sounding out the letters in the words
2. Going from sounding out letters to words
3. Reading the words without sounding
4. Identifying sight/golden/high frequency words

This blog post is about my daughter’s journey from identifying the 42 phonic sounds to starting to read.  Most children will go through a similar process, however, there are many paths to independent reading.

Sounding out the letters in the words

The first step in reading is to learn a set of phonic sounds.  Typically this will be the phonic sound for a, c, n, s, and t.  My little girl had a phonic sound, animal name, and an animal.  Some of the animals were Australia specific, for example, Nelly the numbat (a native Australian marsupial), n, n.  Anyways, once she learned her first 5 phonic sounds she started sounding out some simple words like:
A
c-a-t
m-a-t
S-a-m
a-n-t
s-a-t

What is important is saying the simple phonics sounds – not the word.  Converting phonics to words is another skill that will be learned later in the journey.  Over time these phonic sounds will start to blend and start to sound more like the word.  At this time I noticed she was saying c-a-t and then thinking the word is Sam or some other unrelated word in the book.  To reduce the guessing – I would ask her to sound out the word and then tell her the word.  For example, she will say c-a-t and I will say cat.    Remember it takes all of her concentration to master sounding out the words.

Going from sounding out letters to words

The next phase is to go from sounding out the letters to the word.  In this phase, I started by sounding out the word and my little girl tells me the word.  For example, I will sound out c-a-t and she will say cat.  Later I encouraged her to sound out the word and say the word.  At first, I was amazed by how well she was getting the words correct (not guessing the words).

Once she was able to get the words, I then had her sound out the word her self and then say the word.  This was a bit hit and miss at the start but after some practice, she was able to decode the words in a few books – I think we did 3 or 4 books by sounding out each of the words.   After mastering sounding out the words, I encouraged her to sound out the words in her head (not saying the words).

Reading words without sounding out the letters

It will take a few (I think with my boy it was 4 or 5) books when the little ones stop sounding the word and read simple words without sounding.  This is the process where I suggested to sound out the word in your head and just say the word.  She now only sounds out the words she has not seen/needs to decode.  Her reading has come so far from when we were struggling with just sounding out the words.   My next challenge are the words that do not follow the rules.

Identifying sight/golden/high frequency words

Sight words for me are common words.  There are people out there who count words in written texts and they have created lists of words.  The Magic Word and Sight Words websites are a great place to start.  I am now working with my little girl on recognizing her sight words.  I have found the best way to achieve this is to use flash cards – a100x1500 cards.  What I do is place a set of words onto cards (say the 10 cards with 20 words on each side).  I start by saying what the word is.  Next, I ask what the word is.  This goes on until they can say the word within 3 seconds – then I give her a stamp.  Once she has 3 stamps – I then place a stamp on the word and the word is considered mastered and not shown again.  The goal is to complete the first 300 most frequently used words (80-90% of the words in the printed text) over about 6 months.