Learning to read is an ongoing process and it is hard! You can get some idea of the challenge by finding in your library a book written in a foreign language, and trying to learn to read it. Even then, if it's written with familiar letters, you have a head start. You know the letters and you know the letters stand for sounds. You have the basic concepts of reading down. Your child does not. The process of figuring out the sounds and meanings in a word is called decoding, and it gives you some idea of the reading challenge: Reading is a secret code, and your child has to find the key in order to decipher the strange symbols on the paper. Only when he knows how to understand the symbols and give them meaning can we really say he can read.

Your child may already pretend to read. If he has been read to a great deal, he will pick up familiar books and mimic the way the story is read. He will know his alphabet. He may already know some basic words and if he used the reading methods in my article on preparing to read, he will have a general idea about sentences and punctuation. He has the tools. Now he's ready to progress to reading real books.

There is a tremendous battle going on about the teaching of reading. It was going on when I was a little girl learning to read, and it's still going on today. Should we teach by phonics-the art of sounding out words, or should we teach children by the so-called whole language method? This is the fancy new name for sight reading. My own feeling is that children should be taught to read in every way possible. First of all, every child has a different learning style, and you never know which method will work. Secondly, a child needs every possible tool in order to be a good reader. It would take forever to sound out every word, even if every word followed the rules, which, as we know, they don't. However, memorizing every word is equally impossible, and it limits a person's ability to learn new words as he reads. Imagine having to stop and look up every word you encounter in order to know how it is spelled or pronounced. Imagine not being able to figure out the meaning of a word from its context. Give a child every tool you can find, and he'll be a good reader.

I read recently that one of the strongest predictors of how well a child reads is whether or not he knows his letters before going to school. It is very important that he be able to read his letters quickly and accurately before getting started on reading lessons.

I should make it very clear that I have no credentials. I tutored children in my younger days and taught my own children to read long before they started school. All I have to offer is my own experience and common sense. I have been doing some research, but my word is not infallible. Do your own research and create methods that work for you. I taught all of my children to read using different methods-my own personal laboratory-and they all read equally well, so I'm not sure it matters much as long as it works! One-on-one teaching allows for more variation than classroom teaching does.

We are assuming here that the child already knows his alphabet and can read letters and some words. You should already have been talking about the sounds letters make as you learned them, or as you encountered new words. You need to be aware that phonics instruction may be very difficult for a child with speech or hearing difficulties, so go slowly, or focus a little more on the sight reading side of things.

Be careful when teaching the sounds. Saying that the letter B says Buh is a little confusing when you start using the letter in words. You don't want your child reading, "Buh ad" for bad. It might be better, if he can understand the concept, to give him many words that start with the letter and see if he can find the sound. (You'll know he has it when he starts thinking up words himself.)

Write and say a number of B words. Your child may soon notice that all the words start with the same letter, and since he knows his letters, he will know what it is called. The letter B also starts with the B sound. (Most letters start with their sound. This is a useful memory trick.) If you can keep from having to say a b sound all by itself, you can avoid the distortion. If not, it won't ruin his ability to read! Just point out that when we see a letter B by itself, we often say it says Buh, but we can tell that when we say it in words, we don't hear the buh. It mixes in with the next letter. Sounding out words and going a little faster with each repetition will help get rid of the distortion.

Think up as many words as you can that start with the letter b and make a chart. You want writing and reading to be a part of every activity-just a normal way of life. Also, try not to say that B is for boy. That can be very confusing when he realizes it is also for bear, bat, baby and any number of other words. B is the first letter in these words, not what it is for.

I usually teach the consonants first and then the vowels, or I teach vowels that fit into words using the first consonants we learned. For example, I might teach c and t, and then teach a so I can make the word cat. At first, stick to words that have only three letters and that don't break any rules. These words follow a set pattern: vowel, consonant, vowel. (Also known as the CVC pattern.) You can tell your children that these words are called this and that words following this pattern usually have short vowel sounds.

This means you'll be teaching short vowel sounds, but you should teach both sounds as a principle. When I teach the short sound for the letter a, we practice using it in the word. Then I tell them every vowel makes at least two sounds: the short sound, and its own name, which is also called the long sound. I point out words where the letter says its name. They should have learned the vowels as they learned their letters. You might want to label letters as vowels or consonants using a brightly colored card with a V or a C under each letter, so they learn to recognize the pattern.

Your children should have had lots of exposure to rhyming words and poetry. Rhyming words really speed up the reading and spelling routine. Once you know how to read the word cat, you can teach the letter b and learn bat, then mat, rat...any word they are familiar with. If you write these on a chart, they may soon notice for themselves that everything in the word is the same except for the first letter. Let them try marking the different letters.

You can also use Scrabble tiles or refrigerator magnet letters to spell out the words (or those homemade flash cards you used in teaching the letters.) Let them lay out the letters a and t to make at. Sound out the word, and try it out a few times to help the child remember it. You can even mix up the two letters and let them get them back in order. They can sound out the word to make sure it's correct. When they can do that, add the b. Sound it out again. Now take away the b and add an h. Read that, and continue until neither of you can think of new words that make sense. You can even try letters that don't make real words. If they can still sound it out, they really understand the concept. Of course, this will have to wait until they know enough letters, but you can try out any letters you've learned so far.

Try making this simple tool to help you practice. It is called a phonic slide. Cut off a strip from the end of a file card. Then cut a small opening in the card, just large enough to slide the strip through. (I hope this makes sense. It's easy to make, but hard to explain.) To the right of the slit, write a base word that has lots of rhymes. You might choose ad, for example. Then down the strip, write letters that could go in front of the base word to make new words: m, which makes mad, b, which makes bad, and so on. First have the child sound out the base word or sounds. Then slide the strip through, so that only one letter shows at a time. Let him sound out the new word. So first, he will read "ad." Then slide the strip down until the letter b shows, and let him read the new word that is formed. Slide it down again until a new letter appears and read that word.

After your child has mastered the three letter words, it's time to move to a few four letter words-no, not those. I had in mind words that end in silent e. We might as well get the bad news over with: English does not always make sense. The silent e is found at the end of words and while it doesn't say anything itself, it wields a lot of power, because it usually forces the vowel to use the long sound. One way to talk about this is to pick a word you can already read. Spell out the word "hat," for example with your letter cards. After he has read that, add an e to the end. Tell him you are going to add a very interesting new letter to the word. When you add the e, tell him that when you find the e at the end of a four letter word with only one other vowel, (words that look like CVC words with an e at the end) the e does not talk. Its job in this word is to make the other vowel say its name-the long vowel sound.

Hat now becomes hate. Mat becomes mate. Mad becomes made. Some other real CVC words that can have silent e added to them are: bit-bite, kit-kite, fin-fine, dud-dude, dim-dime, fad-fade, mop-mope, can-cane. Once you've played with that and he understands how the e changes words, you can show him words that don't make anything without the e. Let him practice sounding out lots of words so the sight of a silent e automatically makes him switch to the long vowel mode. (This takes a great many days, weeks, months.... Take your time.)

Later you'll want to show him another way to tell when a vowel is long. "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." This helps in words like bean, eat, meat, rain, main, meet, wait, beat and boat. It doesn't always work, though. Words like bear ruin the rule, but it's still worth teaching.

This is a good time to teach three and four letter words with a repeating e's too, since this rule keeps your child from saying the second vowel twice. Teach words like keep, bee, beef, beep, seed, seen, reed, and feed.

This is enough work to keep you busy for quite some time. Have fun, and I'll get the next phonics lesson up as soon as possible.