phonics need to be instant

Do you think our lion looks like the king of the jungle?
Albrecht Durer painted this lion for us in the year 1521.

Most of what adults do all day is done on automatic pilot, meaning instant and without thought. Even the framework of what we do at work only needs that we plug in the details.

Our young children do not have much on auto pilot. They have to learn even the smallest parts of a job before they can get near finishing a task. 

Even 1st Grade reading requires that your child get into his, or her, auto pilot 26 basic letters plus the 1st 25 sight words. In the brain, auto pilot is called long-term storage memory.  Keep in mind, that working memory calls up into action those lessons from storage memory as your child's eyes move along a line of print.

When lessons are not ready for instant recall - your child's brain will retrieve them too slowly, or not at all. (Think how you react when you cannot find something in your own brain.)

This is not the child's fault, it is the way the brain operates. 

Phonics is the set of letters which stand for sounds: f stands for the sound at the start of fish. The ph team and the gh team also stand for the f sound: phone and laugh. Other phonics teams are the ce in center, gi of giant, ch of chair and ache, etc.

Unknown to our conscious mind, our eyes see which letters and words are going to be needed next. The brain starts searching in storage memory before we are aware it is doing so. When the item can't be found instantly, a cascade of trouble starts for the helpless little reader.  

Teachers want to do it all but there is not enough time at school for the repetition required to get the essential lessons sweetly embedded in storage memory. Parents must help.

My blog has 160 lessons. Use the search box - top left corner - put in: backward b;    sight words; compound word story; short vowel long vowel;  ce;   ge;  oy;  ou;  or any reading topic.

I use ebay as my website, people trust it. Search Instant Reading Help all my books will pop up for you. All are brand new and include my contact info; call for help. Sometimes parents and children do not work well together - very common -- hire a tutor or grandparent to teach my books. You will be glad you did.  Thank you, Mary Maisner