Don’t you wish you could have the best of the both worlds – the best of Doman, the best of phonics, all in one method? Actually, that can be done as well! Thanks to A Proud Papa for sharing his method of successfully teaching his own son to read:
Download A.P.P. flashcards with phonetically grouped words and their illustrations
Step by step directions for using these cards
Flesch’s Instructions [how to teach children to read using phonics]
Amazing Power point presentations on every possible subject by A.P.P.!
Some notes from the producer of these cards

My boy is not yet 2.5 years and can easily read over 1,000 words, probably more like 5K, because he can read/sound out a lot more than I have explicitly taught him. This is because I’ve patterned my presentation of cards explicitly according to phonetic rules, the word groupings in the back of Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” I don’t know, but I suspect that the kids who have trouble learning to read using the Doman method either don’t understand the meanings of the words they see (so they don’t care about them), or they can’t infer phonetic rules from the cards mommy presents…which is absolutely necessary for learning to read. Pictures and simple meaning explanations help the kids to learn the meanings of unfamiliar words, and grouping your word presentations according to phonetic rules a la Flesch, rather than by subject, helps kids to learn the phonetic rules. Did I mention that our little boy is constantly amazing people with his spoken vocabulary? He uses all sorts of words in all sorts of creative ways, in pretty long sentences (not always
meaningful of course!). On Tuesday he said, and I am not making this up, “Today is Obama’s trick-or-treating”…not sure what he meant. His spoken vocab was just average last April when we started
teaching him words using the method I just described (with pictures). When we started teaching him words with pics, his vocab just shot through the roof. Words represent concepts and kids learn concepts
first by concrete instances, such as you see in pictures. Then they learn to generalize from there.

By the way, also contrary to Doman’s method, I have found that faster is not always better. My boy gets bored and annoyed when I go too fast (or too slow, of course). I’ve taught him to tell me when I’m
going too fast or too slow, and I’ve also told him to tell me, “That’s enough” and “I’m tired of this.” And I know this makes me a total Doman heretic, but we did and do “test” our boy as follows. I show him a word. If he says nothing, I point to each letter, and say its sound (“kuh…aaa…tt”). Then he usually says the word (“cat” or
whatever). Then I turn the card over and let him look at the picture. Often he wants to look at the picture and play with the card for a half minute or whatever. That’s OK with me. After he’s seen the word a few times, he either sounds it out himself or just reads it. This way, we definitely know that he can read the words on the cards. I know parents of some babies can’t do this because the babies aren’t speaking well enough yet, so just take this report with a grain of salt which I know you will do anyway!

But I do agree with Doman that in powerpoint-type presentations, a pretty quick clip is necessary to retain attention. It just isn’t necessary for the way I’ve taught my little boy to read.

I know I am annoying and too opinionated for some of you. Sorry about that, I’m a guy, and like a typical guy I just don’t know how to talk except just to tell you what I think. I don’t want to imply any lack of respect, but just because Doman said something, that doesn’t make it Gospel Truth. It just makes it a suggestion. This is particularly true because his very specific methods have NOT been proved through careful, well-designed, longitudinal studies. The fact is that tiny kids can learn to read in various ways related ways that aren’t in
lockstep agreement with Doman.

A.P.P.

Flesch’s Instructions [how to teach children to read using phonics]

Adapted from pp. 125-6 of *Why Johnny Can’t Read* by Rudolf Flesch (First Perennial Library edition, 1966).

1. Start with the sounds of the letters A (all vowels here are taught in the short versions first), B, E, F, G (as in go), H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y (as in yawn), Z.

In the book, there are some letters and pictures. For teaching the letter sounds, you can use many different tools. See http://www.starfall.com/ for one free resource.

Teach Johnny to make the sound when you point to the letter and to point to the letter or write the letter when you make the sound.

Take as much time as seems necessary for this preliminary work; a five-year-old may well spend several weeks at it. Be patient; it will pay off later on. Don’t aim for perfection. Rather, make sure Johnny realizes
that letters stand for sounds and is reasonably good at connecting the right sound with the right letter.

Then, and only then, start with the first set of cards.

2. Whenever Johnny is stumped by a word in the exercises, let him work it out for himself. Tell him to sound out the word. If he can’t, let him look up the letter that is puzzling him and refresh his memory of its sound by
naming the two pictures aloud. Let him do this as often as necessary until he is perfectly sure of the sound of the letter.

For very little kids, I do not recommend this. Slowly sound out the word for him, and he will learn how to sound it out himself.

3. Explain to Johnny carefully that there is a small letter and a capital letter for each sound. However, concentrate on the small letters first. Difficulties with capital letters can be straightened out later.

4. Use the exercises to teach writing and spelling as well as reading. You will probably be tempted to go ahead with the reading and slight the writing and spelling. Try to resist that temptation. Ideally, Johnny should learn to read and write each of the exercise words at the same time. Let him write each of the words from dictation. It is well worth taking the extra time.

Obviously, this is not possible if your child is too young to be able to write out letters. That’s OK. You can still use the flashcards to learn word recognition, anyway.

5. There is a large amount of repetition in the exercises, and 22 of the 72 exercises are reviews. However, that doesn’t mean that doing each exercise once is enough. Do each one of them until Johnny can read and write each word in it without the slightest hesitation. Make as sure as you can that Johnny can really read all the words.

6. Do the exercises in the exact order in which they are printed. Otherwise you’ll defeat your purpose.

7. Watch out for signs of word guessing. Whenever Johnny does any guessing, insist on his sounding out the word and, if necessary, looking up the letter sounds.

In my opinion, Flesch is being a little extreme here. A little word guessing probably doesn’t hurt, as long as the rule is being learned.

Some notes from the producer of these cards

Here’s how I started out my very young son reading, using these cards.

1. We had read a *lot* to him. This is much more important than working with flashcards.

1. The first set or two, I sounded out the words for him carefully, and also read them to him. But I’d ask him to repeat the word back to me. After we went through a set of cards a few times, he was able to read them
himself, after I just sounded them out for him.

1. After a few weeks and a few sets, my son had gotten the whole idea of connecting letters to sound and blending them together to make words. Then I presented a word to him and sounded it out, and then he read it. With more familiarity, he sounded out and read the cards with little or no prompting from me.

1. After he got to somewhere sets 10-20, he not only was able to sound out the words himself, he started saying the words immediately without sounding them out. He was also reading quite a bit in the books we read together.

1. You don’t have to do all the cards in a whole set in one sitting. Let your child decide when enough is enough. Teach your child to say, “That’s enough.”

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Related posts:

Phonics based whole word cards by A.P.P. – step by step instructions

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