Learning to read isn’t always easy. Thanks to our ever evolving language, the rules of phonics lessons seemingly change on a whim, new words erupt with the advent of each generation, and terms that we were once familiar with are no longer spoken. These changes can make full comprehension of our language extremely difficult to learn, and that’s why we must take extra care to not needlessly bombard the effort to learn with trivial things like arrogance, stress, and distractions.

Teacher Arrogance

As a teacher, you already know how to read. As a teacher, your role is to teach someone who doesn’t know how — to read letters, letter sounds, and words. It’s simply no help to approach phonics lessons as common sense since doing so belittles the struggles that beginning readers experience. And the intricacies of phonics lessons will trip any amount of confidence in the subject. None of us will ever know everything there is to know about the English language which in itself, provides a wonderful opportunity to share a young reader’s wonder and marvel over new discoveries and skills.

Student Stress

One of the problems in failing to generate the wonder and marvel described above is stress. That is, when a student is not allowed to express joy in learning a new skill, and instead, chastised or ridiculed for being excited over such a “little thing,” he feels pressured to interpret his reading lessons as something he should already know. The end result is a tendency to guess what printed letters and word represent for fear of being “slow” or even wrong. Instead of properly interpreting letter sounds, a stressed phonics lessons student resorts to inventing words or making up excuses why he can not grasp the literal language as quickly as “common sense” predicates.

Irrelevant Distractions

Another enemy of learning phonics lessons is distraction. That’s why we designed Randy’s Reading Program with minimal but relevant content, visuals and audio cues. Through our evaluation of over 10 different popular phonics lessons programs (including the infamous ‘Hooked on Phonics’), we’ve identified numerous distractions ranging from nonsensical songs all the way to equally irrelevant (albeit entertaining) videos, props, and events. Known as “edutainment,” many of today’s phonics lessons programs attempt to appeal to a young reader’s desire to play games, watch cartoons, and sing songs. While we appreciate play as a valuable opportunity to learn, we strongly disagree with the notion that it should accompany the importance of reading since the entertainment-reading relationship could inadvertently give students the impression that reading isn’t worthwhile if it isn’t entertaining.

Read our article entitled, “Creating a Phonics Environment” for more tips in building a phonics lessons-strong atmosphere. Quite often, the only way to predict the results of a phonics lessons program is to review its facility.