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A child learns to speak before they learn to read. So why not allow a child to develop individual sound isolation and sequencing (phonemic awareness) before we EVER instruct letters and reading (phonics)? All children must develop a basic skill set of foundational skills required for later reading success. Developmentally, these skills begin to emerge as early as age three when a child learns to rhyme. Later, beginning as early as age five, a child will need to acquire the skills of identifying separate sounds within words in order to blend and segment them efficiently. Lastly beginning around the sixth year, child must learn to manipulate single sounds in words in order to clearly judge word relationships based on word structure. Children without the foundational skills of sound comparison, sound blending and segmenting and sound manipulation, must be directly instructed in order to facilitate self-correction.
Up to 40% of school age children will not have the phonological processing skills necessary to readily access phonics instruction. Without preventative measures in place, these same children will likely be poor readers by grade five. This difficulty in judging sounds within words WITHOUT letters, leads to an inability to self-correct. The student is unable to judge whether what they say, matches what they see. This will cause errors such as reading ("sip" for "sap"), spelling ("gril" for "girl") and articulating (wreaf" for "wreath").
Based on National Reading Panel research, a child can acquire phonemic awareness skills in brief, yet explicitly controlled, daily group instruction. At the preventative level, teaching children to systematically identify relationships within sounds and later relationships within spoken words, for just a few minutes a day, can lead to dramatic improvements in later reading and spelling.
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