I’m Sonya Shafer with Simply Charlotte Mason.
Our Delightful Reading Kits will help you teach your child to read using the wonderful
methods that Charlotte Mason described in her books.
We thought you might like to know how Charlotte approached phonics.
There are basically two approaches to phonics: Intensive phonics and basic phonics.
In an intensive phonics approach, you teach all of the possible combinations of letters
that the child might ever encounter as rules.
The child is supposed to memorize the rules and then practice reading words and applying
the various rules.
Charlotte Mason used a basic phonics approach.
In a basic phonics approach, you teach only some basic rules—not every possible combination
known to man.
You give your child enough to help him get started reading but not bog him down.
Let me show you an example of how each of these phonics approaches would teach, let’s
say this line of words: “Fat, hat, mat, sat, rat, chat, that…” uh, this is not
“wat.”
This is “what.”
Now in an intensive phonics approach, you would probably come up with a new rule that
would apply in this situation and have the child learn this new rule and practice reading
any words that come from the rule.
But in the basic phonics approach, you let the child see for himself that not all words
fall into neat little rules.
And that’s all right.
You simply say, "Oh, that word is pronounced differently.
It's "what."
And you move on.
No big deal.
Most children have been dealing with anomalies in the English language for several years
already.
They have informally been picking up many exceptions in hearing and speaking the language
as they go along, and Charlotte trusted that the child would do the same in reading.
Some children do need an intensive phonics approach, but most children will do just fine
having a basic phonics approach.
And that’s how Charlotte approached teaching reading.
In a Charlotte Mason approach, phonics is introduced in the first level, when the child
is informally playing with letters and the sounds they make.
That's the beginning of phonics.
Once the child knows most of the basic letter sounds, he moves on to the second level and
starts putting the sounds together to build words.
At this word-building stage, basic phonics guidelines are given through multi-sensory,
informal games and activities.
And once the child can read a couple of hundred words: short vowel words, long vowel words,
words with blends, etc.—he moves on to the third level that transitions him into reading
sentences and paragraphs and chapters in books.
At that third level, he is encouraged to use a variety of tools to help him progress in
reading.
Word-building is continued, to reinforce basic phonics—and we can give more phonics help
in the moment as it is needed, if he comes across a word that he can't figure out.
Studies have shown that phonics guidelines can be very effective when introduced as needed,
rather than as a list of rules to be memorized, remembered, and applied later.
But we also bring in learning whole words by sight, in order to give the child another
tool.
By the way, if you're curious what the reading lessons look like at this third stage, using
both word-building and whole words, you can watch a demonstration video I made called
Delightful Reading, Level 3: From Words to Books.
Fluency depends on reading whole words, not individual letters, so it's good to give the
child both basic phonics and sight words.
Some children will lean more on the phonics; others will lean more on the sight words to
get up and running with their reading.
I love how Charlotte included both in her approach.
With Delightful Reading, you will give your children several tools to help them learn
to recognize words and to enjoy reading.