I've been following the phonics reading method described in
Teach Your Child to Read in Just 10 Minutes a Day by Sidney Ledson. I was terrified to hear that schools now take the 'whole word' approach to reading - which is basically teaching kids to memorize sight words rather than decode words using letter sounds. I know that when adults read, they don't sound out each word, but rather identify it from memory, but I'd rather give my kids the foundations to understand the mechanics of words. I noticed that when I let the girls watch the
Meet the Sight Words DVDs, they learned nearly 50 words very quickly and could soon 'read' sentences, but if they forgot a word (or came to a word they hadn't learned) they guessed what it was (with the guess usually not resembling the correct word at all), which means they were not really reading. I'm very happy with the phonics approach we're doing now, and the girls (3 years old) are progressing marvelously. Here's a game I made that followed Sidney Ledson's 'block game', or 'train game', but uses frogs instead...
