The guessing game

I loved my son's preschool for many reasons, but one of the main reasons was that they emphasized phonics for early reading. It's a system that works well, I believe, giving a child a solid basis for deciphering words that he or she doesn't know.

It was tricky as a parent. We didn't learn the ABC song right away. A was "ah" as in apple (short vowel sounds first). B was "buh". And so on. I flubbed the system a few times before I got all the basic letter sounds down. By the time my son was 4, I had a solid knowledge of the letter sounds and so did he. At his pre-K graduation, my son was already able to read sentences constructed primarily on these basic sounds with a few "memorized" words. He could read a worksheet that asked: "Is the cat on the bed?" and he could look at the illustration and answer the question.

In Kindergarten, this put him clearly ahead of the reading curve and we've been working hard to make sure that he progresses from his level, even as his classmates catch up.

However, I feel uneasy about the reading skills that public school is training in him. They want him to progress by simply guessing words.

His homework sheets and homework books feature many words that don't follow the basic letter sounds. Of course, in English, he will have to learn these other sounds eventually, given the vast variety of sounds and odd spelling combinations created from those 26 letters. But seeing how well he advanced with the early phonics, I'm not sure if I want him trained to guess.

For example, a drawing will show a girl climbing a tree. The sentence will read: "The girl is climbing." 'The' is one of those basic words that even phonics teachers have the kids memorize. 'Girl' uses all the basic letter sounds, so he could decipher it, regardless of whether he saw a picture of a girl or not. 'Is' also uses basic sounds, which helped him to read it the first time he saw it, though at this point, I think it's also a memorized word.

But 'climbing'? My boy is not ready for the concept of silent letters. But he can use his phonics skills and then guess the rest. The word begins with "cuh" like cat and L. The girl is obviously climbing. So he guesses that must be the word.

After 5 homework books of this, he has well mastered the skill of guessing. He doesn't flub these more complex words. He can just infer what the word is by the picture.

But say there isn't a picture and he sees the word "climbing"? Has he really learned to read the word? I think not.

We had an issue with one of the pages when his guess, though logical, was wrong. The picture featured a slew of crayons drawing colored lines on a page. The sentence read: "I can see crayons." But he thought it read: "I can see colors." Reverting back to the phonics training, I made him sound out the letters to decipher the unknown word, but then I tried to figure a way to explain the "ay" combination and its sound. Which of course is a more advanced dipthong and he's not really ready for it. But eventually I got him to realize what the word was and to stop him from guessing.

I suspect I'll have to be vigilant if I can steer my son away from these potential potholes in his path to a good education.