How to teach
our Children to READ.
Phono-Graphix
TM
By
Carmen & Geoffrey McGuiness |
‘Phono-Graphix
‘ is the name of this new method of teaching reading. IT
IS NOT PHONICS (Phonics is much more complex)
To read a
Research Report on the Phono-Graphix method -- Click Here
This
new method works with ALL children and ALL adults. It is claimed to have an over 90% success rate even with
dyslexic children thought by some teachers to be impossible to teach.
"Reading
Reflex" from
Penguin Books provides all the information needed by
parents to teach their children how to read using the Phono
Graphix method. Step by step instructions and lessons show you how to motivate
and teach a child to read with great success. (Cost of book is
£24.99)
Do not teach whole words:
Children
with Down’s syndrome often start out (apparently) making good progress
with reading by remembering whole words. But no child can remember the whole
dictionary and our children have serious problems with memory.
Remembering words is not how we read anyway.
1. Humans cannot remember more than about 1500 - 2000
unique signs. For this reason, no whole word (logo-graphic) writing system
can ever work or ever did.
Our "sound of words" memory is MUCH bigger. The oral vocabulary ranges from about 50,000 to over
200,000 words.
2. All writing systems use phonological units as a
primary basis for the code, ranging in size from the phoneme to the
syllable. The unit most appropriate for a particular orthography is
determined by these factors: the use of a phonological unit that is easiest
to isolate in speech, the syllable structure of the language, and the number
of types of phonological units in the language. The Phono-Graphix method has identified those sounds needed to know how to read, its the most efficient method of
learning to read.
Memory Problems Our children have
memory problems so it is vitally
important they are taught a method that only requires the least amount of
memory.
ABC"s -- Ideally the
English alphabet -- SHOULD NOT BE TAUGHT -- because the English names of letters
-- DO NOT HAVE -- those same sounds when used in English words.
Knowing the --NAMES-- of letters (The English ABC's) --SLOWS DOWN-- the
process of learning to read English. Most other languages don't have this
confusion, the letter names and the letter sounds are identical.
Children knowing our English alphabet (ABC's) has nothing to do with learning to
read, incorrect name sounds for these letters is adding unnecessary
confusion at a critical point in the learning process for reading. If your child
already knows their ABC's they will stumble repeatedly with incorrect letter
sounds as they learn to read. Save your energy and teach the Phono-Graphix
method from the beginning.
Here
is how the Phone Graphix method works:
- Children
are taught the letters and letter combinations that represent
sounds we use to speak. There are about 150 of these to remember.
- These written
characters or groups of characters are called Sound pictures or Phono-Graphix.
- The
child is then taught how to break down words into the individual
sound pictures.
- Then
sound them out individually.
- Then
the child is taught to join those sounds together, when the combination of sounds is recognised the word is
successfully read.
This
how we all read, we just don't realise that we use this method, we
do it so well, and so quickly.
These 150
letters and letter
combinations
that represent
sounds are constantly
exercised in memory as we read, so they are easily remembered. When faced with words in a foreign language or words we have
never seen before, we immediately slow down and adopt this Phono-Graphix method of
reading. In fact we are automatically decoding whole words into small
sound pictures, combining those sounds in our memory - but sometimes we must say
them aloud. All in the hope that we will produce the sound of a word we can
remember and recognise what that word means or represents.
Linkage of language to life's experiences is a
key element in learning to read. The memories have to be there first
and memories must also be connected to those words. Children with Down
syndrome need to be given many experiences linked to a single word before it is
safely stored in memory. "Apple" must be seen, it
must be held, it must be smelled, it must be tasted, it must be eaten. Then
the word is remembered. Later when the written word is decoded
and the sounds spoken aloud, the sound of that word is recognised and the memories
linked to that word are recalled and the Phono-Graphic representation of the
written word "Apple" has real meaning.
Parents can prepare a story book based on a
child's experiences and use this book to teach their child how to read.
Later the child can write their own story book and learn how to read and write.
A story book can have photos taken with a digital camera of familiar things
around the home and these pictures made into a story book using a computer.
Books that you buy that invoke no memories will be harder to read and will be
less interesting to the student. Reading is all about linking words to
memories of life's experiences then they are linked to imagined experiences.
To summarise:
- Phono
Graphix is a particularly suitable method for children who have
problems with memory.
- It takes what the child already knows - the sounds of the
language - and teaches in careful stages the ‘sound pictures’ that
represent those sounds.
- These ‘sound pictures’ are the least amount of
information needed
in order to break down any word and then read that word.
For
more information on Phono-Graphix
By
Carmen & Geoffrey McGuiness
See
their website at http://www.readamerica.net
