How to help your child have a great future

Do You Hear What I Hear? – Why Phonics
How to open up the world of possibilities for your child.

Do you hear what I hear? A star, a star, shining in the night!

                If you think about it, I’m helping future 22-year-olds to have a great life ~ by teaching kids to read early the right way. I have always known that teaching starts in the home and that we should stimulate our children’s minds for learning long before school starts. The best thing my Dad ever did was teach me to read when I was only 3 years old.

So I followed suit and always spent time showing my children phonics letters, numbers, colors, etc., from the time they were about 18 months on. My older children learned phonics just fine by repetition and memorization.

                And then came along my son who- at age four- could not, no matter how hard he tried, conceive of how squiggly lines could mean anything or memorize which squiggly lines made which sounds, no matter how many times we repeated them. He just couldn’t grasp it. It was too abstract for him.

As mothers do, I worried that he would never learn to read, never graduate high school, never go to college, never get a good job, etc., etc., projecting the worst possible scenario.

                I knew I had to find a way to make such an abstract concept of squiggly lines become more logical, more realistic- something he could wrap his mind around and link with the sounds. I felt inspired to make each letter look like something that started with its sound.

First, I drew on index cards: a plain lower-case letter and its twin that was dressed up to look like a recognizable object. I made them colorful. Then I began teaching my son with the new method by saying the sound and then the picture-letter name, such as, “ă – apple.” The second ‘a’ on the phonics card looked like an apple with a stem and leaf.

                Suddenly my son had phenomenal success with learning his phonics, and quickly progressed to reading before kindergarten. Family, friends, and preschools saw his success and became interested in trying my method with their children.

                I also wrote down the rules and rationales for teaching of my method properly, to guarantee success for other users. In a short time my sisters, cousins, friends, preschools, and church associates wanted a set of my special phonics cards. I drew several more sets by hand and gave them away. All who used them were very successful.

                Back to that future 22-year-old. Early reading develops a child’s imagination. When your child’s imagination is engaged, s/he is better able to face tough things with a creative problem-solving ability.

Along with the values you taught, s/he will be able to think much better when the day comes that s/he has to make decisions without you. The tool for that is to open up his/her world to reading.

When your child has to make his own choices in Jr. High, the magical bullet to get him through may be his ability to think and imagine possibilities- the fruits of reading.

                There are going to be problems and fights along the parenting way; believe me, I’ve had my share. So I want to tilt the scales in your favor, with your young adult looking back and saying, “I had a great life!” because of the opportunities you opened up for her with early reading the right way.

When your child is in college, you’ll think back, knowing that you gave her what she needed to follow her dreams. You’ll think, “I may not have been perfect, but I gave my child what she needed to be happy in life.”

At his college graduation, your 22-year-old son or daughter will be able to hug you and say, “Mom, thank you.”

                So why phonics? Using functional MRI scanners, a research team of scientists from the prominent Yale School of Medicine recently showed that the brain function of poor readers actually changes to resemble the brain function of good readers when taught phonics by direct instruction.

For the children in the study, the phonics instruction formed new, lasting neurological pathways and connections in parts of their brain that regulate reading ability. The children read more efficiently now, too.

No other reading model or method can do this. None.

This has been an excerpt from Volume 3 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! by Shannah B Godfrey. More from this next week...

http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/open-world-how-help-your-child-have-great-future