Phonics Pathways – a great phonics resource to teach reading and spelling.
When my husband told me to start somewhere with phonics, Phonics Pathways by Dolores G. Hiskes was the book I pulled off the shelf first, and last. This simple two hundred thirty-seven page book got me quite excited.
There is an introduction that tells how to use the book, but as with every resource you will come across in your homeschooling journey, you can use it as you would like to. This is how I used it.
With my oldest child, I began at the beginning. I was not diligent in it and time passed after I initially started with it, though his reading continued to progress, so when we returned to it I didn’t need to continue from where we had left off and could skip some pages to the reading of words rather than simply joining 2 letters. I then used it for all 3 of my oldest as their spelling for a year, giving them oral tests which they enjoyed as we moved through it. I am going through the book with my youngest this year and will enjoy the reminders of some of the rules for myself as she learns them for the first time.
One way I have used the book for spelling is by using these spelling pages, which is printed duplex, so it allows for 4 days of spelling. I let the children know which pages to study for the day, and then they write the rule at the top, with the page and date filled in. They each get to write 10 words a couple of times, or more. On Fridays, we have an oral spelling test covering the pages they studied for the week.
Many a morning I hurried downstairs to my husband’s home office in excitement to share with him the latest spelling rule we had covered that I had learned. Being an avid reader as a youngster, spelling was never very hard for me, but while I knew how to spell words, I didn’t know the rules behind them. Working through the book with my children was thrilling even for me as their teacher, as I too became the student and learned alongside them.
The Phonics Pathways book moves forward from simply joining 2 or 3 letters, to simple words, which are read aloud by the child, and of course moving on to more difficult words and the bigger subject of some of the rules of spelling. I found it to be a treasure that I have shared with others, one of those nuggets. Those gems of reference to use.
