At the end of the day, when Dovid picked his daughter up from preschool, he would see the children sitting in a circle singing a song. The students would join in, clapping their hands and stomping their feet with the last word of each stanza:
Willoughby Wallaby Woo,
An elephant sat on you.
Willoughby Wallaby Wee,
An elephant sat on me!
Willoughby Wallaby Wayla,
An elephant sat on Bayla.
Willoughby Wallaby Wira,
An elephant sat on Shira.
Dovid smiled, thinking that he was glad the teacher was incorporating rhythm and music into his daughter’s day. However, what Dovid didn’t realize was that aside from rhythm and music, the teacher was also instilling phonemic awareness.
Through the repetition of the words, the clapping of the beat, and the use of the children’s names, the teacher was teaching them to recognize the different syllables in the words. Phonemic awareness is an important pre-reading skill that is essential in moving forward with reading.
Before the ABCs: Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of sounds which can be assembled in thousands of ways to make different words. Once a child has phonemic awareness, he or she is cognizant that sounds are like building blocks that can be used to build all the distinctive words that are used every day.
Reading to Your Child
Children build phonemic awareness and other pre-reading skills by practicing nursery rhymes and playing sound and word games. Common exercises to develop phonemic awareness include games with rhymed words and ones based on recognizing initial consonants. Parents can help build phonemic awareness through routinely reading to their children. Some good books to read in order to build phonemic awareness are:
Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline
Lois Ehlert’s Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z
Raffi’s Down By The Bay
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Shel Silverstein’s A Giraffe and A Half and Where the Sidewalk Ends
As phonemic awareness is developed, children should become interested in how words are portrayed in print. Daily reading sessions with children following along should help develop their understanding of print concept and feed this curiosity. This interest in decoding the words is the fuel for children learning the alphabet and phonics decoding skills.
Sight Reading vs. Phonics: The Reading Wars
Once a child has fully mastered phonemic awareness, he or she is ready to begin to learn how to read. This is where the real debate comes in: Do you teach through sight reading or through phonics? There are proponents of both sides of the debate. Here are some of the issues:
Sight Reading: Children learn to read through memorizing the appearance of multiple words from books with limited, repetitive vocabulary such as Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. Other methods include slides or cards with a picture next to a word, which teach children to associate the whole word with its meaning.
Often, preliminary results show children taught with this method have higher reading levels than those learning phonics, because they learn to automatically recognize a small selection of words. Children also develop a strong sense of comprehension when reading with this method because they learn to associate a word with a concept. This helps them understand full sentences in a way that might be harder when learning to read through phonics. However, later tests demonstrate that literacy development becomes stunted when children are hit with longer and more complex words later.
Phonics: This instructional reading method involves the relationship between sounds and their spellings. The goal of phonics instruction is to teach students the most common sound-spelling relationships so that they can decode, or sound out, words. Students who have grasped basic phonic rules will be able to read and write new vocabulary much more easily, and perhaps more importantly, will be able to have a go at reading and writing unfamiliar words.
The chart below succinctly lays out the benefits and disadvantages of both systems:
| Sight Reading | Phonics | |
| Pros | Children are quickly able to read short books.
Comprehension is built into the reading process. |
Children learn a skill that they can apply to all words in the language.
Regardless if they have seen the word before, phonics allows children to sound it out. |
| Cons | There are a limited amount of words that people can memorize.
There is no “skill” that children master. They simply learn to memorize. |
Learning all of the sounds in the alphabet is essential before children can read short books.
Comprehension is often stunted because children are busy sounding out words. |
What Works?
As I have discovered over the last three decades of work in reading instruction and remediation, there is no one perfect reading instruction method. At first, sight reading is a positive way to allow children to feel empowered and able to read without the frustration of sounding out each and every word in a book. When first learning to read, children feel pride in being able to read to their parents and peers – and sight reading provides them with that satisfaction. However, without the skills acquired through phonics, children taught solely through sight reading will quickly fall behind. Therefore, phonics in an essential part of reading instruction and integrally important for life-long reading.