Phonics: The Foundation of Reading
Why are students at classical schools taught to read using phonics?
Phonics is a technique for teaching students how to read that involves training them to associate letters (units of written language) with sounds (units of spoken language). For example, students learn that “a” can say /a/ as in hat, /ay/ as in hate, or /ah/ as in father. Phonics are crucial to the pursuit of literacy.
Many schools teach students to read using sight words. This method can get quick results at first—it gives students the gratification of being able to recognize and use select words immediately. But over time, it breaks down as an exclusive learning method because people cannot memorize five hundred thousand English words. The idea behind phonics—which works hand in hand with the lifelong learning so valued by classical education—is to give students tools by which to unlock those five hundred thousand English words.
The curriculum that we use for phonics, Spell to Write and Read, is intensive, giving children the sound of letters and spelling rules—some of which I never even knew before I started teaching! Who knew that A had three sounds and C had two sounds and “ough” had six sounds? “Ough” is often used as the poster child for how terrible the English language is. But the English language really is wonderful—it abounds with precise words. Is it difficult? Certainly. “Ough” demonstrates that. But this is a great program because it teaches students how to decode words methodically and begin to overcome those difficulties. Young children in the grammar stage can quickly memorize volumes of information that most of us would struggle to memorize as older people, so we begin building a bank account of phonics tools for them. I tell my students their brains are toolboxes and their phonics are their tools.
We do learn some sight words as well, because we don’t want them to have to do “torture reading,” where they have to sound out every single word. That’s frustrating to them. It makes them hate reading. When we give them phonics and sight words, they’re able to start off reading more quickly with some encouragement. They get to experience the excitement of realizing, “Oh wow, I can really read this!” But pairing sight words with phonics equips them to decode the words we haven’t learned as sight words. So we use them hand in hand, but phonics is the real foundation of our program here at PCA.
And then we practice all the time! Everything is integrated in classical education; it all ties together. We’ll be doing something in handwriting, and then all of a sudden I’ll say, “Oh, look at this word, we just wrote this! So what's the phonogram in the middle of this word? Who can tell me what sound of S this is?” The integration is so important because we don’t learn subjects in a vacuum. We have spelling, and we have reading, and we have math, but they are also integrated all together, which provides a framework and pegs where our children can hang the information as they’re taking it in. It’s a full orbed way of learning. And it’s fun for them to figure all that out. It’s like a puzzle, and they love working puzzles. It helps their brains—our brains are not buckets to be filled, but muscles to be exercised. That’s what we do all day long in kindergarten at PCA. We integrate everything, and we exercise our brains, and we have fun.
Renee Reed
Kindergarten Teacher
