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Marvelous Monday- PHONICS
By Kendra | June 22, 2009
Our Marvelous Monday series ends today, but you can view all the posts if you haven’t caught up. Click on “Cheryl” to read Cheryl’s posts, and click on “Kendra” to read mine. Brilliant, isn’t it???
Preschool and Kindergarten Cheryl Kendra
Foreign Languages Cheryl Kendra
Handwriting and Spelling Cheryl Kendra
English and Grammar Cheryl Kendra
♥
Phonics has been a fairly natural ebb and flow kind of subject in our home. I find it easy to point out sounds and letters just as we go about our daily life, saying something like, “Let’s put on your red shirt. R-r-r-e-e-d-d. Do you hear that ‘R’? It makes the Rrrrrrr sound.” I point to letters in print or play rhyming games fairly naturally as we go about life.
For formal phonics, however, we use TATRAS. I wrote a wee bit about this program in my post on preschool and kindergarten materials. TATRAS has been a thorough program for us, so much so that I gave the phonics chart a permanent place on our schoolroom wall.
I refer to the chart often in the elementary years because my budding spellers need reminders of what consonant blends make which sounds, etc. And it seems as if I’m teaching someone to read around here every other year or so 
In fact, although I don’t love teaching reading, I am looking forward to helping my daughters and daughters-in-law with their little ones as they begin to learn to read.
TATRAS begins with a little booklet called The Penny Primer, in which the first eight letters are learned and 43 words are decoded. It’s exciting to get through that first booklet and be able to tell the child that they are reading!
When the entire TATRAS program has been completed, the child is a strong reader, has learned all the necessary phonograms to decode and read anything in the English language, and has had ample writing practice as well. I personally don’t stress the writing aspect of TATRAS, and if I have a child who is particularly aprehensive about writing I ignore it altogether.
Check out Cheryl’s final Marvelous Monday post here, and don’t forget to visit her blog after this series. She is a wise woman and I count myself very blessed to have her in my life.
Topics: Educating at Home, Resources, Reviews | 7 Comments »
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Thanks for doing Marvelous Monday’s — I have enjoyed them! Do you use any specific phonetic readers with your beginning readers in addition to the phonics instruction?
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Angela- We have some random ones (like, Dan and Dan) but typically we jump into the first of the Pathway Readers.
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I wanted to share a reading praise that I posted here, but also that there is a free reading resource available that I discuss in that post.
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/UndertheSky/679348/
I also wanted to share the company that sells wonderful real story early readers (www.yesterdaysclassics.com) and I also link to the specific one from that post. This was such a find because many early readers are not very interesting and these are well done classic stories with lots of repetition for fluency.
I thought that since this post was a reading post, you might like it.
XO,
Kate
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Thanks, Kate
June 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Marvelous is right. A huge thank you for your wonderful series. So helpful and informative-lots of ideas for exploring. Blessings to you as you continue to educate, write and encourage others.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Thank you for doing this series, Kendra!
July 5th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Kendra, you caught me by surprise when you mentioned TATRAS. We also use TATRAS, but few know what it is.