File this under: problems that sight-word focused teaching can cause.
Yesterday I was helping my friend's middle daughter study for her first spelling test of second grade. Aowyn is a very bright kiddo, but was struggling with the words a bit. I asked her how to spell "job." (Then I used the word in a sentence involving a chicken - which is a silly thing I always do with my kids - "The chicken doesn't have a job!")
Aowyn thought for a moment and said "J . . . O . . . (sigh) I always get confused between 'job' and 'joy.'"
I looked at her for a second, then said "Aowyn, darling. Sound. it. out." Then I demonstrated the sounding out of the word: "/j/ /o/ /b/."
Her eyes lit up and she said "OH!" She then spelled the word correctly.
I had to remind her several times to SOUND THE WORD OUT when she was unsure of the spelling. And I don't want to always blame every problem a kid ever has on sight-word focused learning. But this one? It fits.
Teaching kids to read by asking them to memorize whole words without the context of this letter represents this sound is a waste of time. And it creates unneeded confusion, as this conversation proves. (To a child who doesn't understand letter sounds, these words are nothing but a jumble of unrelated letters.)
The first thing a child should think about when spelling a word is: which sounds do I hear? And which letters will work together to represent those sounds?
The first thing a child should think about when reading a word is: which sounds do these letters represent?
I know there are plenty of irregular words which don't make 100% sense phonetically. But there is no reason a very bright child should ever try to memorize a CVC basic code spelling word based only on sight and not based on the sounds in the word!
/rant over
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CVC - a word made up of 3 letters: consonant, vowel, consonant. These are the easiest words to start with when a child is learning to sound words out: cat, vet, pig, dog, sun.
Basic code - the simplest way to view the sounds that letters represent. AEIOU are viewed with their short sounds (again: cat, vet, pig, dog, sun.) Consonants are viewed by their most common sounds. Particularly, the hard sounds of c and g are used (as in cat and got.) This is in contrast to the secondary soft sounds of c (/s/ as in cereal) and g (/j/ as in giraffe. Basic code words can be sounded out with a one to one correlation - each sound is represented by one letter.
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