Phonics is the BEST way to learn to read.
If you’ve ever watched the National Spelling Bee, you’ll see the kids using phonics and the language of origin to try to determine how to spell a word.
If you simply do memorization, you are dependent on memorizing every single word you know and if you don’t, you don’t have a clue how to pronounce it. Nor can you sound it out to have any idea how to spell it correctly.
With phonics, you simply sound out the word, knowing what sound each letter makes. It can be learned in less than 2 years in a school setting, at the first and second grade level. I know because we used Ron & Staff Phonics for our kids when we homeschooled them and it as for first and second grade and they learned it all.
And all are excellent spellers.
Phonics is certainly the best way to learn to spell, but I am not sure it is the best way to learn reading. By teaching us to read at sight, one nun had over 120 children in my first grade class reading by the end of the year -- well, that and her fearsome hicory yardstick. I've always been a good reader, and found myself far ahead of neghborhood friends who learned phonetics in public school. Throughout my school years, reading and comprhension were my strongest assets, and I've earned a good living since being able to pick apart the rather dense prose of the Bankruptcy and the Tax Codes. I must admit, however, spelling is a different matter. In this area my skills are not so much, and I blame lack of phonetics for that.
Oddly, when I learned Spanish as an adult, first as a small child might from imersion, and later in an academic setting, I was taught Phonics in Espanol. I noticed the same trade off, slower reading development, but a stronger grasp of spelling.