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Many parents become concerned during the early years of school when their child has difficulty learning to read and spell. Although many teachers try hard, classrooms may be overcrowded and children may be overlooked. Fortunately, there are ways parents can help their child catch up to the class and stay on grade level.

Home-based phonics programs are excellent tools for parents. These spelling programs help the child focus on word patterns and sounds, which is crucial to both reading and spelling.

Phonics is not taught in most schools, and unfortunately many children need that foundation to become good readers and spellers.

Of course, as Torgenson (1998) points out, a home-based phonics program is useless to a child without an involved adult to help. The parent and child need to be a team, working together to build the child's spelling skills.

Phonics is a way of learning to read and spell words by sounding them out. Plenty of research shows that kids learn spelling through educational games. As May (1990) has suggested, children learn more when children find fun ways to learn spelling.

Children remember things better when they enjoy learning them. Hooked On Phonics and other phonics-learning software comes with fun videos and other fun ways for children to practice their word-recognition and letter-group skills.

Of course, most young children will spend much more time playing the games if they have an interested adult or older sibling playing along. Even simply having an attentive adult provide encouragement will keep a child on-task when learning is fun.

Parents, no matter how busy you are, should avoid just setting your child in front of the computer, and then walking away. If time cannot be made to help the child develop phonics skills, sometimes a babysitter or older child will be willing to help with the phonics program.

In order to learn to spell, children need to know more than the alphabet. A good speller knows what sounds the letters make, by themselves and with other letters. Programs like Hooked On Phonics reinforce the relationships between letters and sounds through songs and cartoons.

Children can play online games and read stories that use the sounds they just learned. Repetition reinforces the lesson so that the child remembers weeks and months later the important sounds.

Although it is sometimes overlooked in spelling education, phonemic awareness is the foundation for both reading and spelling. Kids that learn phonics will have a great start to reading and spelling.

Fortunately, kids learn spelling with educational games. Modern phonics programs are designed to keep children engaged, and the successful ones owe that success to the results they produce.

REFERENCES

May, FB, 1990, Reading as Communication. Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Co.

Torgenson, 1998, "Hooked on Phonics", Research in Review, Fall-Winter.