Learning phonics is time consuming but it is something your child has to do to be able to read properly. Phonics are the foundation of reading and without them your child will have problems when learning to read. On the internet and in the bookshops there are many ways to learn to read.
Nowadays most use a phonics-based system but the whole language system is still available. If your child for some reason cannot learn to read with phonics you should look into a whole language approach. I teach using phonics so I do not know anything about the whole language system. Some teachers swear by it so it might have some merit.

To start your kid off on phonics check out some websites that have phonic games or phonic sounds so your kid can hear the different sounds. The best phonic game sites that my kids like to play are Starfall and Genkienglish, a site out of Japan in English. There are many other phonic game.com sites to teach kids phonics and here are some of the others I like, the PBS kids site, Game Goo, Scholastic and Sadlier-Oxford.

I also like to make up the phonic sounds in Montessori sandpaper letters so the child can feel the shape of the letters. Tracing the letters helps to implant the letter and sounds on the child's mind. When tracing the letters the child must say the phonic sound at the same time.

With synthetic phonics the child learns all the phonic sounds first then moves onto words. With the Montessori approach the child learns a few phonic sounds then makes up words using the sounds they have already learned. Also when the child is tracing the letter she is learning to write. I like this approach better but it is up to you and your child.

Most children are brought up to recite the alphabet so when they start to learn to read phonics they have to relearn the sounds, as the phonics letters and combinations sound are different for the alphabet. When I teach phonics I try not to say the alphabet letter sounds that we all know.

Actually there is no reason to learn the alphabet as we never use it for anything other than something to learn. If you just learned the phonics sounds life would be easier. You must tell your children when they start to learn to read phonics to forget the alphabet and start using the new sounds.

It doesn't take long before your children realize the connection between the phonic sounds and words. After they realize this, phonics becomes easier and they start to look at words as sounds and they try to pronounce the word correctly.

A big problem when your children start to learn phonics is, they can read but they do not understand what they are reading. They love the mechanics of reading and can read very well. You have to explain the words and sentence meanings so your children will learn to love reading.

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Peter Legrove spends most of his time in front of a mixed bunch of primary school students trying to instill in them some semblance of the road to survive the future.