This skill refers to the meaning, or ideas, that words
convey. In early reading, the words are usually short and
simple—words like "cat", "run", "sat",
and "bus", whose meaning seems obvious.
With meaning of no concern, sounds become the focus of
learning. That is why children are presented with endless
pages of words that have nothing to do with one another
except for sharing sets of letters.
Sometimes they share:
| Initial
sounds |
— as
in "shed", "shirt", "shoe", "shell" |
| or
middle sounds |
— as
in "food", "boot", "pool", "roof" |
| or
final sounds |
— as
in "lake", "cake", "make", "take", "rake" |
While this was not the intention, the end result is that
children get accustomed to endless worksheets showing words
joined together in a disconnected manner.
In reading real material, of course, words never cluster
this way. Even in the earliest readers, words are linked
together on the basis of meaning — not sounds. A
story about a hungry animal, for example, might say:
| The
bear was hungry. She was looking for some food. She
spotted a tree with berries. ... |
None of the words share common letter patterns. To read
this material, you have to be able to shift rapidly from
one different word to the next. The sound-sharing words
of worksheets do not prepare children to do this, leaving
them at a loss when they have to do actual reading.
For children to become effective readers, from the start,
they must learn how words combine when they convey meaningful
messages. The five reading / writing programs in Phonics
Plus Five™ all pay close attention to meaning so
that your child is always working with words and sentences
that actually mean something - just like the words and
sentences they encounter in real life.
