Why are we so concerned as homeschool parents about teaching our children how to read?  Because individual words have meaning, we string selected words together to represent ideas.  Classical education is primarily about teaching the fundamental skills of the trivium (reading, thinking, and speaking) so that your teen can grapple with timeless ideas.   Therefore reading fluency in the early years is essential if we eventually want to expose our home school high school youth to the ideas of the Western canon of classics.

But teaching our homeschool child how to read comes long before a teenager working on high school credit ever picks up a classic history like Herodotus.  One of the very first steps in teaching reading is decoding the sounds of letters.  Many educators call this process deciphering phonetics, but I never told my kids they were learning phonics.  Rather, I knew how much  Meredith and Connor loved solving puzzles, so I told them that learning how to read was like solving a puzzle.

First, you look at each puzzle piece. (the letter or combination of letters).  Secondly, you process each image (recall the sound that goes with the letters) . Finally, you fit the pieces together to form larger significance (properly pronounce the word and determine the meaning).  As a literate adult, you already have all of the core knowledge that your homeschool child needs to accurately complete the reading puzzle.  Let me refresh your memory.

Every Puzzle Has a Solution

Unlike Spanish which practically has a 1:1 ratio of sounds to letters of the alphabet, the contemporary English language is comprised of over 40 different sounds or phonemes (Greek for “sounds uttered).  If there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, why do we have 40+ sounds?  Well, English as we know it today is the amalgamation of at least five ancient languages:  Latin, Greek, Old English, Old Norse, and Norman French.  Accordingly, modern English has spelling patterns from five languages which naturally overlap.  That’s why a common root like “ough” can have so many different sounds.  Pronounce the following words with the “ough” combination:

enough

though

through

cough

bough

bought

hiccough

tough

How many different sounds did you hear? [1-enough/tough; 2-though/bough; 3-through; 4-cough/bought; 5-hiccough = 5 sounds.  I don't know about your family, but we always pronounced hiccough as 'hick-up.'  Hmm...]

Another reason for the excess sounds are fused sounds where two or more letters blend to form one sound.  Finally, some letters have more than one pronunciation.  The best example of this concept is the English vowel!  All five vowels have at least two sounds (short and long) plus some vowels pair up with other vowels to form separate sounds.

Vowels are not the only letters in the English alphabet with several sounds; many consonants do not have a singular unique sound.  Take the letter ‘c’ for instance which can have a soft sound like the letter ‘s’ or a hard sound like the letter ‘k.’  Then there are the consonant digraphs (2 letters) which form one sound when put together:  ch, ng, ph, sh, th, wh, wr, and kn.  Finally, there is the consonant ‘y’ which does double duty as both a vowel and a consonant.  Whew!

But don’t get discouraged about teaching English phonics.  Although English appears to be complex, there is an order and reason to the arrangement of letters and the pronunciation.  For example, here’s a rule that I’ll bet you know but forgot -  the open and closed syllable:

When a syllable is closed (ie., a consonant surrounds the vowel like the word ‘cat’), the vowel pronunciation is short.  Consider these one-syllable words:

A – bat

E – wet

I – sit

O – cot

U – run

When a syllable is open (ie., one consonant followed by a vowel like the syllable ‘edu’ in ‘education’), the vowel pronunciation is long.  Consider these multi-syllable examples:

A – radiator (ray)

E -determine (dee)

I -trifold (tri)

O -bodacious (boh)

U – super (soo)

Of course, there are exceptions to the rules like the closed syllable followed by an ‘e’ has a long vowel (skate, trite); however, by and large, you can teach your child how to decode the language in a systematic manner.  I would start with the basic sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet (long vowels).  Be encouraged…26 sounds down, and you’re over halfway there!

Next, I would teach the short vowels.  After that, I would teach each of the frequently-appearing consonant digraphs (ch, th, sh, etc.).  Finally, I would tackle the more difficult vowel combinations (digraphs like the ‘ai’ in sail and dipthongs like the ‘ow’ in cow).

Once the homeschool child has a good working inventory of the 40+ sounds of the English language, he can decode almost every word that he encounters in the written text by first slowly pronouncing the individual sounds then synthesizing the sounds to form one word.  This is how I learned how to read, and this is how I taught my own children how to read.  My mom used to always tell me to “sound it out.”  Whenever an unfamiliar word is spotted, approach the word from the left one sound at a time like this: ‘sh-r-ou-d-ed’ or ‘re-ci-pro-ca-te.’  Eventually, the unfamiliar word will become familiar, and your homeschool child will grow in reading fluency and confidence.  So teach your young child to “sound it out” and solve the reading puzzle.

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Are you feeling a little rusty in your core knowledge of English phonics?  The appendix of Trivium Mastery contains six tables that might help refresh your memory and provide a starting place for teaching your young child how to read by deciphering the sounds of the English language.