![]() By teaching some words early through memorization, you make it possible for kids to read while they are learning to read. ![]() You can wait a full year until that system is fully in place before kids can read (as the older phonics programs used to recommend), but there is absolutely no research support for that. What kids are learning when they are taught phonics is how to recognize all words as if they are sight vocabulary. You could teach that as a pattern, of course, some old programs used to, but I guarantee it will take 5-year-olds longer to learn that "rule" (in a two-letter word if the first letter is "o" and the second letter is "f" the "f" makes a /v/ sound). There is only one word in the English language ("of") in which the "f" is associated with the /v/ sound. No one has ever found any negative consequences to teaching students to read particular words, and everyone agrees that you have to teach those words that do not follow letter-sound correspondence conventions. I'd worry that putting the memorization before the fundamental understanding would lead to unintended consequences. Maybe even memorize those "irregular" words. Repeated practice with that should lead to automaticity, no? Then, once they establish a sound understanding of the regular phonics rules, I'd teach the exceptions. Translated to reading: I'd spend more time teaching students the fundamentals of how sounds blend together to form words. Repeated practice with numbers, in a variety of ways, leads to automaticity, when students recognize that 2x2=4 without thinking. And it seems the new approach to doing that is to move away from endless "mad minutes," and focus on developing the fundamental understanding of why 2x2=4. Most agree that we eventually need to have math facts memorized-quick calculations and number fluency depend on it. I wonder how similar it is to the idea of memorizing math facts. Certainly students eventually need to have those lists memorized, and I think the idea of "brute-force" memorization may be the wrong approach. I'm not so sure I agree with having novice readers memorize word lists.
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