5 Ways to STOP Making Homeschool Phonics Difficult!
Homeschool Mom, do you ever get tired of doing things the hard way? Homeschooling is hard enough, so it’s time to stop making homeschool phonics difficult!
First, stop making homeschool phonics is difficult because you don’t know where to start. So now you’re teaching your child random letters and sounds, but not really teaching them how to read whole words. You know you need a plan. Classroom teachers call this a scope and sequence. The scope refers to every phonics skill that you will teach your child in their Kindergarten, 1st grade or 2nd grade year at home. The scope is the actual content and exact phonics skills your child will learn. In the phrase scope and sequence, sequence refers to the ORDER you will teach phonics skills. Starting with the most basic phonics skills before moving to more complex phonics skills. Do you have a scope and sequence? If you’ve purchased a phonics curriculum, there is likely a scope and sequence listed in the front of the curriculum guide or workbook.
Second, stop making homeschool phonics by staying frozen in curriculum overwhelm and choose nothing or leave everything on the shelf. You opened the curriculum you ordered and it looks like too much. Your last phonics lesson ended in endless wiggles for your child and frustration for you. So, you didn’t try it again. You need to build routine in your phonics lessons at home. Your child needs to know what’s coming next. She needs to know the bookends of the lesson so that she can focus in the middle. She knows after this phonics drill or activity, the lesson is done and I get a mental break. Routine gives your child predictability. Your child will thrive on routine. Build in routine right now at the beginning of this back-to-school season. If you’re stuck on creating a phonics routine, or how to demonstrate phonics skills to teach your child to read, ‘Hi there. I can help. Head to phonicsrulesforkids.com/coaching and let’s spend an hour sorting out your child’s phonics routine.
Third, stop making homeschool phonics difficult because you don’t want to spend money on yet another homeschool curriculum, so you resort to random alphabet worksheets. You don’t know which letters you’ve already taught. You’re not exactly sure how to teach the ‘qu’ grapheme and its corresponding sound /kw/, so you print off the worksheet for your child and hope they’ll get it.
Fourth, you don’t teach phonemic awareness, not that you don’t want to, but you don’t know how. How do I teach that? When you don’t give your child a solid foundation of listening to sounds and asking them to blend the sounds to say a whole word out loud, she’s missing the foundational phonics skill of phonemic awareness. Every word in the English Language is made of one or more phonemes blended together. When you teach your child the oral phonemic awareness skill of hearing a whole word you say, and have her chop the word apart into individual phonemes, you’re setting her up for success as a speller when she begins matching sounds to letters, or phonemes to graphemes.
Fifth, stop making homeschool phonics difficult by not reviewing phonics skills, the accompanying sight word or heart words every single lesson before moving on to the next sound-symbol relationship. It may seem like your child is not absorbing phonics skills, like water off a duck’s back. Ducks have oily feathers, so water slides right off. When phonics or sight word knowledge goes in, nothing seems to stick. You may think your child has weak sound-symbol decoding, when in reality, you haven’t reviewed the skill with them until your son or daughter can automatically recall the phonics skill you’ve previously taught.
Stop making homeschool phonics difficult by fixing the above mistakes!
