Learning to read
A phonic approach
I've always adopted a straightforward phonic approach (no 'look and say' or 'whole word reading') as I've found this to be the most effective method for producing fluent readers (as opposed to children who can read the correct level of a reading scheme book but stumble when confronted with a real book). Phonics gives children the confidence to have a go at new words. Moreover, even if direct instruction in phonics isn't needed because a child has managed to read without it (as many seem to), it still comes in very useful as a basis for spelling correctly later on.
I think one important thing to remember, however, with a phonic approach is not to get so focussed on teaching each individual grapheme-phoneme correspondence* that we forget the big picture, i.e. learning to read books! We want our children to want to read, we want them to love books. There's a danger with focussing on phonics that we wear a child out and drain his enthusiasm for reading: the exercises can seem meaningless (I know because I've made this mistake myself a few times). We need to keep on reading to our children, letting them see how important reading is to us, and encouraging them by focussing on the end result - that great feeling of being able to pick up any book they choose and master it for themselves.
(*or GPCs as they're known in school jargon - meaning, for example that the written symbol, or grapheme, 'ai' makes the sound, or phoneme, 'long a'),
A note on reading schemes
I've found that if one follows a phonic approach, there's no need to invest in a reading scheme. These are aimed at schools and although each individual book can be cheap, the cost soon adds up if you want to buy the whole series. If you want the security of a reading scheme, getting hold of a second hand set is a good solution. Reading schemes are updated fairly regularly (so all the schools need to buy the latest ones), but reading doesn't change, and a set from the 90's, 80's or even 50's can do the job just as well (Peter and Jane, anybody?). Be careful when choosing one: many schemes work on the basis of a controlled vocabulary - the child learns a set of words by sight and these are the only words used in the reading book. One big problem with this is that you can get a child who may have successfully read all the 'readers' for his level, but flounders when confronted with a 'real' book, simply because it contains words he hasn't been taught yet. If you teach a child to decode words phonetically, he can have a go at a real book much sooner. Obviously, you still need to build up slowly and at first use texts which contain only the GPCs he's covered - but even learning the whole set of these is a lot less work than having to build up a memory bank of countless thousands of words and yet still being clueless when confronted with a word one hasn't met before. I tend to just make very simple three or four page books to practice the letter combinations learned so far or to practice new ones.
(Details on the methods and materials I've used to teach our children to read can be found In Preparatory Level: English)
A phonic approach
I've always adopted a straightforward phonic approach (no 'look and say' or 'whole word reading') as I've found this to be the most effective method for producing fluent readers (as opposed to children who can read the correct level of a reading scheme book but stumble when confronted with a real book). Phonics gives children the confidence to have a go at new words. Moreover, even if direct instruction in phonics isn't needed because a child has managed to read without it (as many seem to), it still comes in very useful as a basis for spelling correctly later on.
I think one important thing to remember, however, with a phonic approach is not to get so focussed on teaching each individual grapheme-phoneme correspondence* that we forget the big picture, i.e. learning to read books! We want our children to want to read, we want them to love books. There's a danger with focussing on phonics that we wear a child out and drain his enthusiasm for reading: the exercises can seem meaningless (I know because I've made this mistake myself a few times). We need to keep on reading to our children, letting them see how important reading is to us, and encouraging them by focussing on the end result - that great feeling of being able to pick up any book they choose and master it for themselves.
(*or GPCs as they're known in school jargon - meaning, for example that the written symbol, or grapheme, 'ai' makes the sound, or phoneme, 'long a'),
A note on reading schemes
I've found that if one follows a phonic approach, there's no need to invest in a reading scheme. These are aimed at schools and although each individual book can be cheap, the cost soon adds up if you want to buy the whole series. If you want the security of a reading scheme, getting hold of a second hand set is a good solution. Reading schemes are updated fairly regularly (so all the schools need to buy the latest ones), but reading doesn't change, and a set from the 90's, 80's or even 50's can do the job just as well (Peter and Jane, anybody?). Be careful when choosing one: many schemes work on the basis of a controlled vocabulary - the child learns a set of words by sight and these are the only words used in the reading book. One big problem with this is that you can get a child who may have successfully read all the 'readers' for his level, but flounders when confronted with a 'real' book, simply because it contains words he hasn't been taught yet. If you teach a child to decode words phonetically, he can have a go at a real book much sooner. Obviously, you still need to build up slowly and at first use texts which contain only the GPCs he's covered - but even learning the whole set of these is a lot less work than having to build up a memory bank of countless thousands of words and yet still being clueless when confronted with a word one hasn't met before. I tend to just make very simple three or four page books to practice the letter combinations learned so far or to practice new ones.
(Details on the methods and materials I've used to teach our children to read can be found In Preparatory Level: English)