I am one of those strange people who remember a great deal from early childhood (earliest memory goes back to before my second birthday, in 1947, before coming down with polio). I recall learning to read by recognizing signs, road signs, stop signs, billboards. It is as if a switch was flipped and the name Chevrolet that I heard on the radio was somehow the same as the word on the side of the car in the parking lot, the word Stop was that same funny sign with lettering on it. Sight recognition of words was the beginning. Learning that some words had more than one sound in it (more than one syllable) came next and learning the visual version of the sound. I could read at age four, not just recognize words but read sentences. Somehow the words were sounds, like music, to my still forming brain. As a kid, my favorite word was ‘cellardoor’ ... yeah, I know it’s two words, but to the just learning to read kid it is a musical ‘phrase’ as one thing.
Home-school oldie but goodie (I recently bought a new set for grandkids):
Sing-Spell-Read-and-Write
“Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons”. Available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, etc. It teaches reading via phonics. I’ve taught 7 children to read well, beginning with this book. As the title says, it’s broken up into 100 lessons, taking 15 minutes or less. At the end, most children(people) are able to sound out most words and are beginning to read easy material with relative fluidity. I’ve been homeschooling for 25 years - recommend it heartily. An adult should be able to sail through the book quickly.
Let me post a tribute to my mother, kind of tying to a thread just above. My mom had been a teacher and she taught me to read. A-B-Cs then phonics then flash cards. Dick and Jane then wonderful golden books.
I was far ahead in reading when entering the first grade and I love reading. I owe my love of reading and what success I’ve had in life to my mom’s early teaching. Thanks for the opportunity to think back to this foundation.
I have always loved reading and spelling came naturally to me. For some reason I had trouble with g e o g r a p h y until my dad made up a verse. George eat old gray rat at Pa’s house yesterday. Never had any more trouble. I do not know why that has stayed with me from age 6 or 7 way back in 1950/51. My mom was a great speller too and won school spelling bees.
Taught my boys to read. Homeschooled. Easy and beautiful! Go look at seton homeschool website and you will see the schooling program and books I used. Can just get/take reading for your neighbor through highschool! Could not reccommend it more.
Phonics works best to teach how to read, whether for children or for adults. I benefited from it when I was taught to read in Catholic elementary school. At the time, a little more than five decades ago, phonics was regarded as old-fashioned, with the look see method then all the rage in public schools. Yet phonics has endured, while the look see method and other innovations have wreaked havoc in the public schools.
You can get a re-issue edition of McGuffy or a copy in PDF format all divvied up into individual lessons. If you’re interested I can send you the information. It is what I used with my home schooled kids.
I recall other lessons based on mistake made due to some sounds being different than the general ones. I pronounced "said" as "sayed" and we had another lesson about recognizing words as their own units that sometimes sounded different that what we expected from the spelling.
Phonic based would be my choice - takes patience to get familiarity with the letters and their sounds and then building, but it works and embeds the skill indelibly.
In those days, the readers they used repeated “know on sight” words, like “look, see, and, here, there, she, he, was, were,...”
They taught phonics to read, but not always in individual letter sounds. There were rules to memorize and that were practiced in readers. For example, kids were taught to memorize “tion” sounds like “shun.” So the word “question” the child would sound out ques as individual sounds and then add the memorized sound of “tion.” Their readers were designed to memorize these rules of phonics and the occasional exceptions to the rule.
Liberals always made fun of how “boring” the “Dick and Jane” readers were. They were not intended to be novels. They were intended to teach reading to young students so they could actually come to read interesting novels.
When you say it just seemed to happen naturally, it is probably because you had memorized sounds within words and enough sight words that could suddenly you could just look at a sentence and know the words.
Liberals erased the “boring” idea of rote memorization in reading and in math.
My oldest son was reading at age four because I showed him these sounds of words as we read every day. Then he started reading me books and I acted the part of an enthusiastic child.
We picked funny books with twists on word meanings or absurd story lines that struck his funny bone. These books showed him words sound the same but are spelled differently with different meanings. Like Amelia Bidella books where she is a maid and in one story, asked by the lady of the house to stake the tomato plants in the yard. Amelia thought that was a strange idea, but she did what she was told to do. So the lady of the house returns to find pieces of steak tied to each tomato plant. Or Morris the Moose, whose human friend wanted to feel his forehead to see if Morris had a fever. Morris says “I don’t have four heads!!!!!”