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I saw someone wearing a shirt the other day with a saying on it that made me smile. It said

"Hukd awn fonicks werekd fer mee "

Teaching children to read is not always a simple "cut and dried" issue. While one method may work well for one child, the same method might have no effect on another, even within the same family.

My eldest son learned to read at a very young age, around three years old. I used the same method to encourage reading in my youngest Son, and it took until he was eight or nine years old for him to grasp and enjoy reading.

We had no idea until he was tested in school that he had dyslexia, a common type of reading disability. It has been established that this occurs more in boys than girls for some reason. Dyslexia causes the eye to put the letters in words in a different order. This explains why the phonetic method was not working.

Although my son tried his best to learn to read, it was a difficult task for him and he started refusing to read. It was through encouragement and trying alternative reading methods that he finally won the battle of reading.

I suppose the method that helped him the best was word recognition. Once he realized how a word was pronounced, and remembered what it looked like, the next time he saw it he knew how to pronounce it.

Of course having dyslexia gave him trouble learning how to spell words, and it's strange but he seems to use a form of phonetics to spell. Over the years he has figured out that a combination of more than one method is the key to both learning to read and spell.

The English language is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and the one rule you have to remember is that there is an exception to every rule. Trying to learn to read English by using the phonics method alone just isn't going to cut it. Using a sight recognition method by itself works for a while until the child starts reading a large number of words and has to use them in different tenses .

In my opinion the best method to help children read is a combination of both the phonics and sight recognition methods along with flash cards, good memorization skills, dictionary skills, and a basic knowledge of English language .

Learn more about this author, Kathy H.
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