Phonics is a useful tool later, but teaching smart children to read with phonics is very confusing to most of them and sometimes slows them down. Phonics works to teach �decoding� skills, but a child who knows how to decode still may not understand what he reads. Most really bright children appear to start reading almost spontaneously
I think sometimes it is easier to figure out a pattern for yourself than to understand someone else's explanation of it. This may be especially true for very young children who may have pattern recognition skills in advance of their language skills. I
know my DD3 would not have learned to read as early as she did if I had tried to teach her how to do it. I will stay out of the phonics vs. sight words debate (at least for now
) but I will say that I agree with Ruf that explicit reading instruction is not always appropriate for early readers.
