Home phonics program

[moonpie]

Does anyone have a recommendation of a phonics based program to teach your child to read at home? Also any recommendations of tv shows, board games, or apps that help support early literacy would be great.

Dd2 is 5 and seems developmentally ready to read. She attended a great play based preschool where she had learned her letters and sounds. She loves playing rhyming games with us and asks us what specific letters spell all the time. She does have some vision issues, so larger text and contrasting colors are easier for her.

She heads to K this fall, but unfortunately our public school has a terrible reading curriculum. It took us until 3rd grade to break all the bad reading habits DD1 formed in K and 1st grade, and I think she only truly became fluent because she had an awesome 3rd grade teacher who was previously a reading specialist and she really connected with her. I’d like to avoid the years of tears and frustrations that DD1 had if we can help it.

Also, a new curriculum is coming, but has been slow to be rolled out and DD2 probably won’t see it until 2nd grade. Unfortunately we are in an affluent district so parents have just been hiring reading tutors instead of complaining to the district that their child can’t read. Teachers can only push back so much without parental help/support.

[UMaineTeach]

ufli.education.ufl.edu/foundations/

Our K-2 is going to start this program this year. A couple teachers tried it out last year and liked it. It taught them some reasons why English works the way it does that they didn’t know and were able to pass on to students. The slide shows and digital materials are all free, you just have to pay for the UFLI foundations book.


Teach Your Monster to Read is an app we use. It’s also free (but might have a one time cost for iPad) www.teachyourmonster.org/

[macmars45]

If you're looking for workbooks, I've found good ones at The Dollar Store. 

I'm a Reading Intervention Para. For kinders we do mostly games until January. Anything with CVC words (can, to, see etc). Splat is a card game. Different pack focus on different things. There is ABCs, sight words, beginning & ending sounds etc. Teachers Pay Teachers has great options too

And honestly getting Ready to Read books in whatever she likes as well as BOB books. Your local library should have both of those options.

[nicolewi]

If your daughter has really good foundational skills already, I truly think just reading a lot at home (together; out loud/switching pages) and going to the library often might be all you really need to do. Most phonics programs are really dry, but that said, I’m also a big fan of them because one of my kids is dyslexic and absolutely needs phonics type programs to be able to read. So it’s not that I don’t think phonics has a place, and I understand where you’re coming from. It is probably a good idea to try to do some phonics. It’s just that it may or may not be more than you need to take on??

That said, our school is using Sonday phonics. There is a dyslexia program called Wilson that you can get trained to do at home, but I think that’s a little bit of a bigger undertaking for sure. They might have an at home spin off for people without a lot of training… I don’t recall for sure.

[charteroakstate]

Aug 14, 2024 8:43:49 GMT -5 macmars45 said:

If you're looking for workbooks, I've found good ones at The Dollar Store. 

I'm a Reading Intervention Para. For kinders we do mostly games until January. Anything with CVC words (can, to, see etc). Splat is a card game. Different pack focus on different things. There is ABCs, sight words, beginning & ending sounds etc. Teachers Pay Teachers has great options too

And honestly getting Ready to Read books in whatever she likes as well as BOB books. Your local library should have both of those options.

Heggerty is a great phonemic awareness/ phonics program which is very fun for kids and includes gestures that support muscle memory. As a former reading specialist and current K-4 admin, that would be my rec for an at home program; however best thing you can do is read to your child, play word games and talk about language as it naturally occurs around you. Please keep it developmentally appropriate and fun!
Also, “to” and “see” are not CVC words.

[nicolewi]

Ah! Yes! Heggerty is what my then-kindergartener watched during virtual school!

[Saudade]

Aug 14, 2024 7:51:34 GMT -5 UMaineTeach said:

ufli.education.ufl.edu/foundations/

Our K-2 is going to start this program this year. A couple teachers tried it out last year and liked it. It taught them some reasons why English works the way it does that they didn’t know and were able to pass on to students. The slide shows and digital materials are all free, you just have to pay for the UFLI foundations book.


Teach Your Monster to Read is an app we use. It’s also free (but might have a one time cost for iPad) www.teachyourmonster.org/

My second grader used UFli last year and it was AMAZING!!!! It was new to the teacher last year and she loved it and my kid thrived with it!!!

[heygrey]

Not a phonics program, but for early reader Bob Books are my absolute favourite. They are cute, short, and progress in difficulty as reading improves. I used them with DS and constantly pull them out to support students.

Last year I had a grade 3 student who was never expected to read. Multiple programs had been introduced over the years and nothing clicked with their brain. I read the same Bob book everyday with them, and the repetition of high frequency words finally connected and they had 50+ site words by the end of the year. Sometimes simplicity and repetition is better than all the tricks.

[erbear]

Not gonna lie, my older DD learned to read watching Super Why.

[waverly]

Teach your child to read www.amazon.com/s?k=teach+your+child+to+read+in+20+easy+lessons&crid=3BVC9V6RBGHUR&sprefix=teach+your+child+to+read+in+%2Caps%2C93&ref=nb_sb_ss_pltr-xclick_4_28

Level A first little readers - they are a lower level than level 1 which is helpful.

[macmars45]

Aug 14, 2024 9:34:58 GMT -5 charteroakstate said:

Aug 14, 2024 8:43:49 GMT -5 macmars45 said:

If you're looking for workbooks, I've found good ones at The Dollar Store. 

I'm a Reading Intervention Para. For kinders we do mostly games until January. Anything with CVC words (can, to, see etc). Splat is a card game. Different pack focus on different things. There is ABCs, sight words, beginning & ending sounds etc. Teachers Pay Teachers has great options too

And honestly getting Ready to Read books in whatever she likes as well as BOB books. Your local library should have both of those options.

Heggerty is a great phonemic awareness/ phonics program which is very fun for kids and includes gestures that support muscle memory. As a former reading specialist and current K-4 admin, that would be my rec for an at home program; however best thing you can do is read to your child, play word games and talk about language as it naturally occurs around you. Please keep it developmentally appropriate and fun!
Also, “to” and “see” are not CVC words.

Sorry, I misspoke. Those are sight words. I'm new to the reading intervention program at my work.

CVC words are: can, hat, pen, zip etc (consonant, vowel, consonant)

We use Heggerty a lot with our kinders and a quick daily lesson with our 1st & 2nd graders as well.

[Poppy]

Our school uses Haggerty. The kids also work independently on the app called Lexia.

We used Duo ABC (free app game by the makers of duo lingo - highly recommend). Super Why is a good TV show. There's also a good video/song of the letters saying their sounds. My daughter learns really well from songs so that was helpful. youtu.be/neItURLvyIQ (I think it's also available on streaming. Was it countthestars who recommended it?)

But yeah, the most effective way IMO is to read decodable texts (eg BOB books) together and keep working at it. It's a slog, though.

[expectantsteelerfan]

Aug 14, 2024 10:33:58 GMT -5 erbear said:

Not gonna lie, my older DD learned to read watching Super Why.

LOL Super Why and Word World cartoons totally helped both of my kids.  As did Bob Books.  

[sillygoosegirl]

We use Logic of English at home and I really like it. But it's a multi-year program, maybe not the best pre-kindergarden or after school crash course. Although they do have a paired down version designed to be used just that way called "Sounding Out The Sight Words". It's like the company's one product that I don't own, but I'm very intrigued by it as a supplement for a student getting another reading program. The whole premise behind Logic of English is teaching the ENTIRE code so that students get to learn why every word is spelled the way it is. With LOE, we never say, "Oh, that's an exception," instead kids are taught that, for example, S can say either /s/ or /z/. So words like like "is" or "dogs" aren't treated as exceptions, they are simply words where S is saying it's other sound. (Fun fact, S says /z/ about 70% of the time if you count plurals... yet children are routinely not taught that it can say /z/ at all). The /u/ sound in "of", "the", and "was" is a schwa, which again is a SUPER COMMON pattern that we simply don't normally teach. I'm not sure if the "Sounding Out The Sight Words" book gets into the morphology that explains such head scratchers as "one" and "two", but even those words are explained by the program if you go far enough in it. ("one" is morphologically related to other words with related meanings: "lone", "alone", "lonely", "only", and "once", and "two" is of course related to "twelve" and "twenty", but also to "twin" and between".)

My favorite phonics app is "Teach Your Monster", which is quite good. The only thing I don't like about it is that there are some dialect issues. In particular, it says that OR makes the same sound as "AW", which is true in some dialects, but pretty far off in ours. Sometimes it's free, sometimes it's a few bucks. In spite of that weird dialect issue, it's still my favorite computer based reading program, and I've tried lots, including ones you pay a good bit of money for. I don't like the sequel game though.

I personally detest Super Why. Maybe I've gotten unlucky in the episodes I've seen, but it seems like I'm always seeing them telling kids to guess words based on context and stuff. I've not seen a good show on phonics. I really like Word Girl, because it's clever, hilarious, and does a nice job introducing vocabulary, but unfortunately it doesn't cover phonics.

I also really like Kilpatrick's PAST assessment, which you can google for and administer at home. If your child enjoys rhyming games, hopefully that means you don't need to worry about extra phonemic awareness work, but I had a kid who knew all her letter sounds before she was 3, loved rhyming games, and yet STRUGGLED (still struggles at almost 10) to transfer those skills to reading. The PAST Assessment is the only test that she's been given that seemed to explain why she struggled. Heggerty (mentioned above), or Kilpatrick's drills in Equipped For Reading Success both work those skills. You can also work them with letter tiles doing activities like word chaining. Reading Simplified has a word chaining activity you can download for free and is another good early practice activity. I feel so-so about Reading Simplified as a program, but it's definitely decent and if you like the idea of watching ~10 hours of videos as your way to learn how to do reading instruction, it can be a good fit. (You don't have to wait until you've done all the videos to start either. It wants you to watch a 30 minute video and then try it with your kid, and so on.)

[pierogigirl]

Zingo has sight word and early spelling/phonics bingo games that we played when my kids were little. There's also a picture one for non-readers or for kids who don't know their letters.

[arehopsveggies]

UFLI is great, I’ve used it for a couple years as a supplement and now we are using it as our main phonics curriculum

If you google Tara West, she has a lot of free phonics slides, games, activities

Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun app

[suzubell]

Heggerty is primarily for phonemic awareness, not phonics. Stick with UFLI. It’s easy, cheap, and super effective.

[felicity]

Another vote for Bob books. We did a little every night before bed during our normal reading time. I definitely credit this for teaching him to read way more than what he was learning in school.

[awkwardpenguin]

I think a lot of this is what works for your particular kid. My older was homeschooled during the pandemic and learned to read from just phonics games and a lot of reading together. My younger has a reading disability and nothing we tried on our own worked - we eventually did Spell Links with a SLP practice and also did a lot of phonemic awareness games (because anything we tried with actual letters resulted in tears).

I think as a supplement I'd grab some phonics centers off Teachers Pay Teachers. Grab the UFLI scope and sequence to know what to teach and in what order, but I'd focus on games and keeping it fun. I'll throw some links below of our favorites. I used "Sweet for Kindergarten" as my guide and used a lot of their centers too.

Sweet for Kindergarten K Phonics: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kindergarten-Phonics-Curriculum-Bundle-Lessons-and-Activities-for-the-Year-3963002

Roll and Read Template: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Editable-Roll-and-Read-Game-Template-Phonics-Word-Work-Review-Activity-4446748

CVC and Rhyming game boards: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/CVC-Game-Board-and-Rhyming-Activity-1794094

CVC Picture cards: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/CVC-Picture-Cards-freebie-310796 (we used these to segment sounds, identify beginning, end, and middle sounds, etc)

POP game about blends: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/POP-A-Beginning-and-Ending-Blends-Card-Game-1722872

[al dente]

This might be dumb and I'm no professional lol, but when I started using my finger under the words I feel like it clicked for my kid. She also had her letters/sounds down. Piggy and Elephant books were the first thing she started reading.

Bob books are also good. I had a hard time finding them though and didn't want to buy all the sets.

[moonpie]

Thanks everyone! This definitely gave me some direction in my search!

[jg183]

Aug 18, 2024 20:16:45 GMT -5 suzubell said:

Heggerty is primarily for phonemic awareness, not phonics. Stick with UFLI. It’s easy, cheap, and super effective.

agree with this

[jg183]

theres a pbs show on youtube called Reading Buddies too