Phonics Is The Devil

Phonics is crap. I will never understand the point.


Once you learn the alphabet, and what sounds each letter makes, why spend so much time going further than that?

From that point, just start sounding words out, in books, and around you. Deal with the exceptions when you come to them. Lord knows there are plenty of them in the f-ed up English language.

You're not going to learn to read until you LEARN TO READ. Put it to use right away. Nothing teaches you to read better than READING. Sitting around doing exercise sheets on the "oi" sound or the "th" sound for a year is such a waste of time. READ!! By the time kids "know how" to read, they're probably so bored out of their minds from all of the "oi" worksheets, and baby stories that are made up of only words with "oi" in them, that they could never imagine that a book could contain an interesting story, so why bother.

You don't have to make learning to read so insanely structured and manic. Human brains were MADE to learn to read and write. Just a casual "hey, th makes the sound th...", is plenty. You don't need to spend 3 weeks doing worksheets on "th". Just have the child read aloud, and when they come to the word "think" you just casually say "see that TH? Th sounds like th...". And you keep going. You'll probably only have to say that 2 or 3 times. Kids have great memories.

Reading teaches you so much more than anything else. Seeing words in context. Seeing how words are spelled. Seeing sentence structure. Critical thinking skills are being used.

When you READ, you not only figure out what a word IS, you see how it is used in context. How it is used in a sentence. You are multi-learning (is that a word? If not, I just created it!).

All of this phonics crap obviously isn't working, when you take the illiteracy rates into account. Maybe we're spending too much time teaching kids HOW to read, and not actually making them READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And why do kids who already know how to read have to take phonics?

Try a little Dick and Jane. Now THERE'S a fantastic way to learn to read.

Keep it simple, stupid.