How I taught my preschoolers to read, write, and spell

When my children were preschoolers, I heard Charles Sykes, author of Dumbing Down Our Kids, explain why many kids can’t read or spell. He recommended reading Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolph Flesch. So I did.

Until reading this book, it never entered my mind that some people guess at new words and don’t know how to sound them out. Now I learned that most American public schools stopped teaching phonics (the 44 sounds in the English language and the 70 common ways to spell those sounds) back in the 1920’s and that millions of kids have been taught to memorize whole words rather than sound them out.

Pictographic languages such as Chinese use a picture to stand for each word. Learning to read and write is arduous. You have to memorize 10,000 pictures in order to learn 10,000 words. But since you can never memorize every picture, you can never be 100% literate in a pictographic language.

In contrast, English—in fact, any language with an alphabet—uses letters to represent sounds. So instead of memorizing thousands of words like you do in Chinese, you simply learn the 44 sounds and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds and presto—you can read and write anything.

I checked out all 26 books on phonics from the library. I read every one. The best one was Phonics Pathways by Dolores Hiskes, which I’ve used and recommended for many years. I also bought and used Hooked on Phonics, which originally was a great product (it’s been watered down since).

Determined that my children would be good readers, I began teaching phonics to my 5-year-old daughter Becca while we sat at the kitchen table. I remember her 3-1/2 year old brother Kevin standing nearby, intently following the lesson and watching his sister.

I recall Kevin said, “I don’t need to learn this.”

I answered, “Well, now that you mention it—I think you can learn this stuff.”

So I tried an experiment. Could a 3-year-old really learn to read? I sat Kevin next to his big sister and continued with the phonics lessons. Every day for at least an hour—using Hooked on Phonics or Phonics Pathways—I taught them the sounds of letters and guided their hands as they wrote shaky letters on preschool tablet paper.

Each day, they learned a new sound such as short /a/, which sounds like a as in apple. Then I would dictate a few random words from the lesson for them to spell (such as cat, hat, tap, ran), which reinforced what they had just learned.

In this way, they learned to write while they learned to read. The two processes are different sides of the same coin: reading is decoding sounds from the page, while writing is encoding sounds to the page.

Sure enough, within six weeks, they both were reading and writing. At age 5, Becca had enough hand coordination for her writing skills to keep pace with her reading. Kevin’s writing skills lagged a bit behind his reading skills, because hand coordination at age 3-1/2 is pretty limited. But still I was impressed!

A few years later, I also taught Kevin’s younger sister Teresa to read at age 3, starting lessons even earlier than before. I used to ask her, “Do you want to take a nap or do phonics?” Invariably, she answered, “Do phonics!”

While Teresa learned to read quickly, she did have a pronounced lisp at age 3, which is very common in children: she said the /w/ sound for /r/. I nicknamed this the “wascally wabbit pwoblem” because the cartoon character Elmer Fudd never could catch that “wascally wabbit” (rascally rabbit) in the Bugs Bunny cartoon. Teresa and I used a mirror to practice saying the /r/ sound and other sounds. The mirror practice paid off and by the time she was four, she could speak perfectly.

I ran into another problem when teaching my youngest son Ryan to read at age 4. I wondered why he was not learning as quickly as the others. Then I noticed that when he looked at a printed page and then glanced up at me, his eyes were crossed! Here’s the problem, I thought. Ryan explained that he saw double images on the page. I took him to an eye doctor, who prescribed special eyeglasses to correct his vision problem. Two weeks after getting glasses, Ryan was reading.

I also tutored other children. Aaron was an affectionate, cheerful boy with Down’s Syndrome, who also suffered from a serious hearing loss. While I tried diligently to teach him the letter sounds, he could not hear me properly and was unable to repeat the sounds back to me. I recommended a hearing aid for him because we weren’t making any progress. Unfortunately, the family could not afford a hearing aid at that time and so we stopped the lessons. Sadly, I don’t know if he ever learned to read.

Another boy I tutored was brought to me at age 10 by his mother after his teacher said that he would fail third grade if his grades did not improve. He had already been forced to repeat a grade and his mother did not want this to happen again. He could not read and had been labeled “learning-disabled.” I tested him and discovered he did not know any vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u) but did know most consonant sounds. I immediately taught him the short vowel sounds and how to blend sounds. By the end of the first lesson, he was sounding out three-letter words like tip and hat.

I recommended that the boy continue with lessons for an entire year until he was reading and spelling fluently. Unfortunately, the family idolized baseball above academics. When baseball season arrived, his mother decided that baseball took priority over academics, and she stopped lessons so he could attend baseball practice. However, even though he only received 12 hours of direct, systematic phonics instruction, that was enough to keep him from failing.

The correct label for this boy’s condition was not learning-disabled but teacher-disabled (due to wretched instruction) and parent-disabled (due to placing sports above academics).

This mother’s priorities were completely wrong and reinforced my belief that lack of parental action can easily turn a child’s temporary reading difficulties into a lifetime of academic failure. She did not take action until her son was 10 years old, when she should have intervened to help him when he was 6 or 7. Research shows that the single most important factor in a child’s academic success is how well he reads by the end of first grade. Children who are not reading fluently by the end of first grade will continue to flounder in school, unless a parent intervenes dramatically.

What I learned from tutoring is that a person of normal intelligence, vision, and hearing can learn to read and spell if taught direct, systematic phonics consistently. 

Now I was convinced of one truth—that phonics knowledge is essential to reading—and slowly, my mind opened to the possibility that there might be other “truths” out there.

While researching reading programs, I found Bob Sweet, founder of The National Right to Read Foundation (NRRF), a pro-phonics educational organization. He pointed me to additional valuable phonics resources. First through his actions and later with words, Bob also planted the seeds of the Christian faith in me.

I wanted to help with the foundation’s mission, so I volunteered to create the original NRRF website. I also worked for several years updating the website and reviewing reading programs. Although Bob passed away a few years ago and his foundation is no longer active, I consider it a blessing to have worked with him and his sweet wife Joy. They were beautiful Christian witnesses who dedicated many years to helping desperate parents teach their children to read.

I developed two resources which were posted for many years on the NRRF website. I revised and reposted them below as free resources for parents or teachers who want to learn how to teach reading quickly and effectively using phonics. Feel free to share these resources widely.

• Phonics Checklist – a free resource for reviewing reading programs. Many reading programs claim to teach phonics, but they don’t work because they don’t teach the 44 sounds and 70 most common ways to spell those sounds in a direct, systematic way.
• Phonics Primer – a free resource to teach reading using phonics first.