Much of the curriculum I see these days, even the ones that are based on the science of reading, teach the sounds incorrectly.
I know that is a strong statement and really, who am I to call out all the experts? Let me tell you why.
When I look at curriculum, I always look for the phonograms. I want to see if they are taught and how they are taught. Most of the time, I see no mention of them. I might see them in pictures in the background and that always excites me. At least they are being used.
But then I see a few lessons and often I see that sounds are being taught instead of phonograms being taught. That might not make any sense, so let me explain.
When I teach the phonograms, I teach all the sounds of each one. For instance, when I teach the first phonogram, “a”, I teach all three sounds. Short a, long a, and then the third sound of “a” (as in “all”). This continues all the way through to the last phonogram, “ough,” which has six sounds.
When one of my students encounters a phonogram they have learned, they can try all the sounds. They are prepared, having learned all the sounds, and then use logic to figure out which sound the phonogram uses in the words to be decoded.
But what I’m seeing in most curriculum is the teaching of sounds. Let’s start with “a” again. I’ve seen lessons where long “a” is being taught. There is an entire list of phonograms that make the long “a” sound. For instance: a, ea, ay, ai, eigh, ey, ei. I don’t like how random this is. I need explicit!
I recently had an epiphany on this. Beginning readers aren’t decoding sounds, so they don’t need to think of all the phonograms that can make a specific sound. They are decoding letters and groups of letters, i.e. phonograms, that make up words. When they start decoding a word, they need to recognize the phonograms in the word and then determine the sound of each phonogram, and if there are multiple sounds for a phonogram, they need to determine which sound is correct.
Every time I saw the teaching of sounds, it troubled me. And this is over quite a few years. I finally thought about it enough to engender an epiphany. It makes a lot of sense now why I was so troubled. If a phonogram is being taught, why not teach it fully rather than sprinkle in the sounds across many different lessons?
Even after this explanation, I get that I’m being presumptuous in stating that all these experts with more education and experience with teaching reading are wrong. I was lucky when teaching first grade to teach using The Writing Road to Reading, which was extremely explicit. My students were very successful with that program and children I have tutored have been very successful. Hence my strong opinion on how to teach reading and the epiphany I shared here.
