Have the phonics method always been taught in school? When I went through school I don't remember being taught the method, but rather repetition of words lead to memorization. I could be wrong and it was just soooo long ago, but I just wonder if this whole phonic thing was a fairly recent addition to our schools' methods.

i am 44.... they had it when i was a kid in 1970. but it was a new concept

Thanks jenjoysoup... I am 38 and just don't remember anything about phonics growing up but I also think I was going through school during the time that they were changing everything up. My 4th - 6th grade school had no real classrooms. It was an open building but my small town bought the idea of the building but then put up every make shift wall and divider they could to carve out rooms and taught in the old style which meant there was a lot of noise factor that didn't go well with the way they instructed.

I also did not get the typical structuring of sentences and dividing it out to learn what is a noun, adverb, etc. So I still am pathetic at sentence structure.

So I am not shocked it was around while I was groawing up but the way my school district picked and chosed their methods it really was a pathetic process.

I'll be 53 this summer, 'whole word' or 'sight reading' became popular a few years after I started school. I remember my mom being so frustrated with how my youngest sister was being taught. She's 5 years younger and phonics were not taught in school for her.
If you get a chance, find an old McGuffey Reader, those are some of the older books used for teaching reading. Phonetic markings are used in the book.

So, phonics has been around much longer than 'whole word' reading. Oh, if you are not sure about sentence structure, blame that on modern teaching methods that did away with sentence diagramming.

I'm 44 and I don't remember being taught phonics, but I also read at 4 so maybe I wasn't shown phonics? Or maybe it was so new then that it wasn't where I lived at. The first time I had heard about it was when my DD24 was in 1st grade, she came home from school with the system to improve her reading. Got to admit it helped.

LOL .. thanks OHG. That was what I was trying to think of ... see I really didn't get it since I couldn't even think what they call it!!!! But yes I went to school when they eliminated sentence diagramming and seriously paid the price. I find my grammar to be pathetic and though I am amazing in the conceptual; I always need someone to check my grammar. Pathetic and sad and YES due to my 'modern' teaching environment. (Okay... the pick and choose style)

I learned to read with "Dick and Jane" books and I don't remember being taught phonics, but my mother showed me how to sound out words. I remember being a much better reader than my classmates. I don't remember hearing about phonics until my 28 year old daughter started school. I think she had learned phonics by watching Sesame Street in preschool and she was reading at 4. My 10 year old didn't go to preschool but watched Between the Lions and probably picked up some phonics instruction there, but I think he started out sight reading. I thought he had to have some knowledge of phonics when we could spell out words that he hadn't been taught when he was just 2 1/2 and he could identify the word.

I could read before i went to school, but i talked backward, so really no one knew but my sister... who understood the backward talk. I remember my reading teacher trying to teach me to read using phonics and trying to tell them I already knew how to read.... and then reading things to her, and then her going back to the letter sound thing... which made no sense whatsoever! (I get it now thankfully)

I learned with "Dick and Jane" too. I purchased the books for my two younger daughters. One started reading before 2 and the other about 3, it's a great series for kids to start off with, one read 65 pages the first time she sat down with the book the other read 35 pages the first time she saw the book, I don't know why they don't still use these?

I learned sentence diagramming in 7th grade, from a teacher who was ancient. That would have been 40 years ago(eek!), and I think she was pushing 70 at the time. I'm serious, she went to the same church that we did, so I knew her family. So she probably learned sentence diagramming herself about 100 years ago. I find that fascinating to think about. In her life, she saw planes be invented and man land on the moon....

Back to phonics, I've always been fascinated by how people learn to read. I remember reading, but don't remember learning to read. Mom must have taught me phonics, because I remember on occasion I would be stumped and she would have me sound it out.

GS9 kind of learned phonics a bit, then jumped right into reading. We've had to go back to review phonics a bit this year to help his spelling. I found this website, history of reading instruction, it's pretty interesting.

Interesting that "Dick and Jane" are smack-dab in the middle between sound and meaning! And the only method in the middle like that.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing that!

I remember my mom telling me that one of my older sisters taught me to read around 4; she showed me the first book I read: Kalumi the Brave - I am still trying to figure out how that could be the case. It is a really beautiful visually stunning picture book, but definitely not a first reader.

I loved loved loved diagramming sentences; especially the bit where you do the gerunds - up on that little stilt-platform. (what a dork! )

I might have to check out the Dick and Jane books for dd, I know I've seen them at the Borders, I wonder if they have them deep in the library somewhere...

Interesting website OHG. Thanks for finding it. It really answered my question about phonic method.

And I also ponder the amazing things my grandmother saw in her life. She was 94 when she passed last year. She grew up in a share cropper community and used transportation of horse and buggy. I have some amazing pictures of the extended family usually around the new car since it clearly was a luxury that not everbody could afford. Then fastforward to not only cars being the main transportation, but planes, sputnik leading to the race in space. Also the technology world and the wars that drove it. What an amazing time to have lived.

And the Dick and Jane books have made a come back of sorts. Last year I made DD a summer halter dress using the Dick and Jane fabrics. It is absolutely adorable with the text on the bodice and the pictures for the skirt. I really am hoping that she can still wear it this year. Also I was able to find a little dick and jane set at Half Price books for hardly anything. I don't think I have seen the books at Barnes and Nobles but you probably could order them online.

this is the one I started my girls on "A Treasury of Dick and Jane" It has lots of stories and is almost 200 pages long.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/A-...f-Grosset-Dunlap/e/9780448433400/?itm=77

Hope this helps

I cannot remember learning how to read or a time when I could not read. But I do remember the Letter People from Kindergarten. I can still see those inflatable characters sitting around the room. I think they were trying to teach us phonics with it and teach us some simple words like CAT. I did not learn anything, but the songs and characters were kind of fun. (And so was the sand table.) I recently saw that they have revised the Letter People to be more PC and that they are still being used in some private schools.

My father has mentioned that when he was in first grade (early 40s), the teacher would not let the class move on in reading until every single kid could read whatever they were learning. He said they went over it and over it until everyone was completely bored. I think he still has bad feelings when he thinks about it. What a great approach to education!

I was taught to read with phonics as a child. I really didn't know there was another way until my cousin, a teacher, told me about whole reading. It seemed bizarre to me since it was so different from what I had learned. I also wondered how are you were supposed to read a word you had never seen before since you could not sound it out. When my children were ready to learn to read, I taught them using phonics since that is all I knew and they were not in school yet. One of my friends let me borrow a set of Dick & Jane books while I was teaching my youngest to read. Though she had learned the basics of phonics and was already reading, her reading fluency improved dramatically once she started using the Dick & Jane books.

These days the newest rage is balanced literacy which is essentially a combination of phonics and whole reading.

I dug around on the net, and it appears I was wrong about the McGuffey Readers having the phonetic markings. The first books I read at home were very old, at least my mother's first books, posssible her mother's. Those books had phonetic markings. I'll have to look around and find them. I inherited a bunch of old books when mom & dad passed on a number of years ago.

I wonder if whole word reading comes back in fashion as they see some of the brightest kids pick up reading that way at first? I found this in the website I linked,
I wonder if that's why so many teachers think the kids "all level out about 3rd-4th grades"?

I'm like lily -- I don't remember before I could read -- I know I was reading well enough in K to read directions on the worksheets and work ahead! And I zoned out and didn't pay attention when they *were* working on reading, and was subject accelerated over first grade reading ... I'm almost positive I learned to read with whole words.

I'm pretty sure they did phonics, but I'm not positive. I'm one of the younger parents on here, I'm pretty sure (I'm 26).


In my experience this is completely *not right.* Aren't thousands of examples intuitively enough for sounding out new words? Ds6 was an early self-taught whole-word reader, was never "taught" phonics beyond "b says buh" (until K when he was already reading longer chapter books) but made the leap to being able to decode unfamiliar words by the time he was 3.5 or so. He just internalized the rules from the words that he knew by sight, no phonics instruction necessary.

He may have used sight words as training wheels (and adults read using whole word recognition!), but it certainly wasn't "only the illusion of reading"! If a kid is reading Beverly Cleary without overtly being taught phonics, I'm pretty sure he was really reading.

I guess ND kids have a harder time making that leap when they do whole-word instruction? Well, obviously, I guess ... I'm not trying to sound snotty, it just seems odd to me! It doesn't seem like that much of a leap, with thousands of sight words under your belt, to not internalize many phonics rules without the overt teaching. Say, you recognize the word "apple" without sounding it out. Well, you know a says "ah", p says "puh", l says "ll" ... can most third or fourth graders really not make the leap from "apple" to, say, "apply"?

I guess I don't know. My "normal-dar" is a little skewed.

ETA: Oh. I see that this quote is from a website called "The Phonics Page." Maybe a little skewed, ya think? I should check sources before I go on rants!

I agree, Mia. Maybe it is a difference between how GT kids read and how ND kids read, but I don't necessarily think that phonics have to be drilled into kids or that whole word reading is so limiting as all that.

Fluent readers read whole word. Phonics always seemed to me to be a way to get kids to the point of being able to read whole word. If a GT kid starts at whole word on his/her own and is able to apply that knowledge to new words, I don't really see any reason to belabor phonics instruction. I also don't get why an ND kid couldn't internalize the rules of pronunciation when taught whole word.

I think some combination of phonics and whole word instruction is probably best, but I also don't buy the "they just memorized 1000-2000 words and couldn't really read" statement about whole word instruction. That seems loopy to me. If the kids knew the alphabet and "B says buh," how could this be?

Me too! That is one of the few activities from school that i remember, and i remember loving it! Dorks unite!

We are in the beginning stages for DD. She clearly has memorized alot of words and has known her ABCs and the sounds they make since before she was 18 mths. I have tried phonics with her but she acts like she isn't interested but when she sees a large word in front of her (and she knows what the word is) she sounds it out and then tells me the word such as alligator. Is she really using phonics? I don't think so but rather playing a game but maybe through the game she is picking up on some of the phonic techniques. At this point it really doesn't matter. I am sure she will take her own path to reading and for the most part it is memorization but I think Mia is right. Smaller words lead to recognition of bigger words and when she gets to a big word she just might have to sound it out. But I think this thread has a great thesis in it.

My 2 younger girls had different approaches to reading. The 5 year old who was reading before 2 understood phonics at 18 months, she was sitting at the kitchen table and just blurted out "Mommy, mommy begins with the letter M mmmmmmmmm. After that she started pointing out words reading street signs I finally put a book in front of her and she read 65 pages her first sitting. At 5 whe was tested at a 5th grade reading level. My other daughter started reading at 3 the same book, she read 35 pages her first sitting, now at 4 she is just starting to understand phonics with has expanded her reading greatly. She has not been tested but I would guess her at a 1st grade level based on the books she can read. So I think phonics lets the child expand their reading abilities, but they might still use whole reading while using phonics for the unfamilar words.

Understanding phonics was a huge help to me when I began studying foreign languages in middle school. I actually majored in foreign languages in college and speak one besides English fluently, as well as conversational in another language and I can easily read two others. It also helped me as a teacher of kids whom English is a second language.

My DS is a primarily Leapfrog-taught phonetic reader. It took him longer to read fluently than those who we know who are sight word readers. However, from what I've seen, he is able to tackle new harder words much more effectively than those who are sight readers. I don't think it really matters much in the long run- sight readers memorize new words very quickly!

Chris and SPG- if you've never studied language that is from a different base than your first (like English is primarily latin-based), diagramming sentences is a very very useful skill! Sometimes you have to know which is the direct object and indirect object to conjugate the proper case. Most high school students in the US can't do that today! (Seriously revealing my language geekiness here!)