Phonics Programs

How To Get Your Kids To Do Chores

admin — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you are at your wits end trying to figure out how to get your kids to do chores, you aer not alone! Homes across the world struggle with chores day in and day out, as kids seem to put them on the backburner of the important things that need to be done. Luckily for you, and the rest of the world who have kids who do not like chores, getting your children to help out around the house might be easier than you think.

Making chores fun is the easiest way to get the little ones to help out. Remember what it was like to be a kid yourself and want to play, play, play? Turn chores into play! Almost any chore can be turned into a fun game they will love to play, and accomplish cleaning in the process. Activities can be centered to the age of your child.

Incentives are also a great way to get the little ones to do their chores. Create a list with the chores that are expected of each child, and reward them with a small token of appreciation or a treat, such as a small toy or an ice cream cone.

Get involved and this will be more motivation for your children to do their chores. While you shouldn’t complete the chores for the child, showing them that chores do not hur can do nothing but good.

Chores are never something children want to do, but you can get them done when you use the tips that are needed for success! Try them and you will see the difference!

How To Make Road Trips Fun

admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone loves vacation, but some travelers are reluctant to take the trip because of the long drive ahead of them should they go. There are a few things that can make the road trip much more fun. The most important thing to think about when going on a road trip is activities along the way, especially those for children. It is best if each child has group activities to do as well as individual activities. There may come a time when everyone does not want to interact with each other. For children, be sure to get group and individual activities that the child has never used before. A toddler, for example, will be much more trip compliant if they have a new toy than if they have the one that they have played with a thousand times before. The same rule goes for adults. Get a new card game, new video, new electronics, or even a new cd to make the long trip much more tolerable. This does not always have to cost you a lot of money. Local libraries lend out books, cds, movies, and a lot of other types of multimedia. Find some group activities and some individual activities that are new for your trip.

Ways To Get Your Kids To Enjoy Reading

admin — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Being a parent is one of the most difficult jobs that a person can have. The sleepless nights, packing lunches at 5 AM, and constant care is one of the most challenging things that a person will ever have to go through. On top of all of this, one of the biggest hurdles a parent can face is teaching their child to embrace their education.

To most children, school and everything related to it is a very boring occurrence; they will do anything to avoid math, science, and reading. However, as we all know these things are all very important staples in any human being’s life. So what can you do to get them to enjoy these things a bit more?

While math and science can prove to be a challenge to teach a child to enjoy, perhaps the largest protest amongst children is their requirements to read.

To a child, reading is most likely a waste of time. The time spent reading could be spent elsewhere such as the park or with their friends, so how do you teach a child that reading is a fun activity?

Many libraries offer reading programs with other children and toys as props to show them that reading can put you in a whole new world, and be fun too! Another way to broaden your child’s horizons is to put together a reading group with their friends. Each week the group can read a new book and play with different toys relating to the story. This way your child is getting time with friends, and a great education!

What to Do When Your Child is Having Trouble Reading

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When your child is having trouble learning to read it can be a very stressful time. Children who fall one or more grade levels behind in reading often have trouble catching up so take the time now to find out how you can help. Here are a few suggestions for helping your child learn to read:
Get them to a phonics program: Perennial favorites among teachers and parents alike, phonics programs often help children learn to pronounce words and letters in a new way. By breaking down reading into smaller parts many children are better able to understand how words work together.
Get a hearing test: If your child is having lots of difficulty reading and speaking it may be possible they are having trouble hearing. Get a free hearing test for your child and see if they may need guidance when it comes to hearing aids or other hearing devices.
Talk to the teacher: If your child is just beginning to learn it’s possible that his teacher’s teaching style is prohibiting progress. If necessary, sit in on a class or two or even ask the principal for special tutoring options.

Tips for teaching children phonics

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:44:49 +0000

There are many phonics-teaching techniques that have been developed over the years to aid parents and school teachers. Remember that no matter which program or techniques you choose to use, patience is the most important toolfor both you and the child you are trying to teach. With a good attitude and lots of practice, these techniques can result in an exciting new learning experience for your child.

Model your program after the child’s interests. Children are more inclined to learn if their interests are included. If they enjoy learning about different types of animals, include these words as your examples.
Short vowel sounds take more training than long vowel sounds. Because long vowel sounds simply make the sound of the letter, you will have to focus more on the short vowels like “u” in “duck” and “e” in “hen”. Visual displays are a good way of getting this information across, so either construct or work with your child to make a wall display or poster that will serve as a friendly reminder.
Use key language in your approach. Vary from the traditional ways of asking questions like “What is it?” and “What is the first letter?” Asking questions in a variety of ways that connect to the children’s understanding level can help make phonics more fun. For example, say, “What do you see here?” This also helps to integrate phonics into the child’s daily life.
Use rhyming as a tool. Rhyming is one of the simplest ways of teaching phonics, and children can begin learning it very early in life. Teaching tongue twisters and nursery rhymes is an easy way to get kids used to the phonetic sounds, as well as how words work together.

Teaching reading to children with hearing loss

www.phonics-programs.com — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:43:37 +0000

If you’re the parent of a child suffering from hearing loss, you’re probably wondering what exactly you’ll be facing when it comes to the areas of reading and vocabulary. Many of these problems are related to “whole language” types of understanding, which means phonics could be useful in helping them to sound out words. Depending on the type of hearing loss, it can be helpful if your child has a hearing aid from a trusted source like Miracle Ear. Some children will be able to use the hearing aid to process spoken English, while others will only be able to use it to sense sounds.One of the biggest obstacles in children with hearing loss is that vocabulary develops more slowly. It is easier for these children to learn concrete words that refer to objects, such as ball, cat, and jump than it is to learn more abstract words. Abstract words can include feelings, function words like the and an, and prepositions like before and after. Words with multiple meanings cause extra difficulty.Hearing loss also heavily affects speaking, since children with such loss cannot hear the quieter sounds that “s”, “sh”, “f”, “t”, and “k” make. Without understanding that these sounds are there, the speaker cannot replicate them in their own speech. Associating the sounds with letters and memorizing words may be one way of dealing with this difficulty. Children with hearing loss also may not hear their own voices, which can affect the volume or pitch at which they speak.In addition to reading difficulty, most children with hearing loss experience difficulty with mathematical concepts. If intervention is not started early, the children usually cannot progress past 3^rd- or 4^th-grade educational levels. However, with the help of patience, family and friends, and organizations like the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, many children with hearing experience greater progress.

Phonics fun on the internet

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:40:14 +0000

Today, it’s not uncommon for children to be more proficient at the Internet than their parents are. That’s why the web is the perfect outlet for interactive phonics games. As long as your computer is hooked up to a speaker, these sites will offer free ways for your child to explore the world of reading. Complete with kid-friendly graphics and sounds, these games are sure to be hits.Starfall: The site began in 2002 as a free service to motivate children to read. In 2009 Starfall released the Kindergarten Reading & Language Art Program, which can be purchased by teachers or homeschooling parents. Their website, however, still features all of the classic learning games and activities. Online books feature characters like Zac the Rat and Gus the Duck, while the Art Gallery introduces children to classic artists like Vincent Van Gogh. There is plenty for both parents and children to explore on this site.Between the Lions: This long-running PBS show is a favorite among children for its humorous content and among parents for its skills in teaching reading, pronunciation, and grammar. The online site features several reading-related games. The most directly phonics-related game is Dub Cubs, a musical game in which children practice rhyming words with similar sounding pronunciations.Earobics: Earobics is a reading and literacy company that offers a variety of products for parents, teachers, and students. On their Game Goo website, they offer several free games which can help children learn about the relation between letters and sounds (in other words, the basic idea behind phonics). In Alien Scavenger Hunt: Letter Bugs, players hear a word and then “capture” the letters necessary to make up that word. In Alien Scavenger Hunt: Space Trash, the basic gameplay is the same, but with space trash in place of bugs. In Paw Park: Sassy Seals, players match words starting with the same phonetic sound.

How does phonics work?

www.phonics-programs.com — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:33:21 +0000

The phonics method of teaching reading is a traditional but highly effective one, as proven by both the National Research Council in 1998 and the National Reading Panel in its 2000 report. The basic idea consists of teaching children how to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters, which are then blended together to form new words. This allows the reader to sound out vocabulary words, even if they don’t know the meaning. While phonics is used today to teach the English language, the basic idea dates back to a Roman text The Doctrine of Littera, which stated that a letter consists of a sound, symbol, and name. These three elements are what students in phonics programs learn.The reason phonics works for English is that the language is based on an alphabetic principle. Other systems can be logographic (Chinese) or syllabic (Japanese). Some of the controversy about the phonics system has come from the fact that unlike Spanish, English spelling does not have a one-to-one correspondence, due to its roots in five different languages. The Great Vowel Shift between the 15^th and 18^th centuries has also contributed to a large variability in how a particular group of letters may be pronounced. One of the most common examples is the letter cluster ough, which has different pronunciations in each of the different words enough, though, through, cough, bough, bought, and hiccough.Teachers and parents should not be put off by these facts, though. The point remains that spelling rules in English are usually more than 75 reliable. Learning the “alphabetic code”, as Dr. Marilyn J. Adams put it in1994, allows children to free up their mental energy when learning new words, making it easier to comprehend meaning. This process can even help deaf children with the assistance of a hearing aid to understand the sounds.

Hooked on Phonics in history

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:23:07 +0000

When John M. Shanahan created a phonetic study tape for his son Sean in the mid-1980s, he was going against the “modern” perspective on teaching reading. However, it was far from a new learning technique. Phonetic learning was the traditional way of learning to read before the 1930s, when professors decided that the technique was redundant and pointless. Instead, the prevailing belief became that children would learn to read naturally if they were faced with simple words in context, as in the “Dick and Jane” schoolbooks.However, this technique failed Shanahan’s son Sean, whereas phonetic techniques on tape worked. This success, and the popularity of the tapes among his neighbors, inspired Shanahan to market his system as “Hooked On Phonics”. He focused on advertising to sell the product, even going so far as to purchase the phone number 1-800-222-3334 (1-800-ABC-DEFG) for 10,000.The millions of dollars spent on advertising certainly helped, but the fact that Hooked on Phonics worked was the real draw. Along with updating the basic system, Shanahan added a Hooked on Phonics Writing Kit, a Hooked on Phonics Classic Achievement Series, foreign language programs, and more. While these proved popular among parents and children, Shanahan did not have any scientific statistics to back up his advertising, a fact which led to a landmark FTC case. Shanahan sold the company and it was bought up by a former satisfied customer. The new corporation launched the studies to prove that not only was Hooked on Phonics working, but it was working better than any other system.Today, Hooked on Phonics features both testimonials and awards on its site, including the Teachers’ Choice Award for the Classroom, the Curriculum Administrator Districts’ Choice Top 100 Products, and Dr. Toy’s Best Educational Products. The company also offers different products for different age ranges, starting with toddlers and going to 3^rd grade & up, so parents can rest assured that there’s a program specially tailored to fit their child’s needs.