Punch 7 - Mastery

Focus On Mastery

In your teachings you want to accomplish mastery with each new introduction of information. It takes time to lay a foundation and set a spring board for diving deeper into phonics and decoding which ultimately lead to fluent reading.

Be confident your child has mastered the phonetic sounds of each letter in his name and subsequently the word list you created in punch 3. It's OK if your child needs to spend 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks reviewing the same information. We are looking for mastery in understanding the relationship between letters and sounds and the moving from sounds to words.

One child may completely "get it" on the first try, for another it may take a few days, and another weeks. Either way each child will have a moment when it all clicks and they start to run away with their newfound reading skill. Johnny B. Good may click in January while Susie Q. clicks in March, chances are, come June they will be reading the same books.

Do not let peer pressure in. No matter what your neighbor's daughter is doing, your son and her could still wind up at the same college.

The Name Game

Should you have a letter from your child's name that is not used in any words from your list, simply introduce another letter, or two if necessary, to make a word. Much like I showed you with Hannah.

Example: With Hannah we did not use the Hh, so I would introduce the short vowel sound Ii and letter Tt with it. Equipped with these two sounds, and what we already have, I have a whole new list: it hit, hat, in, ant, tin, tan at.


Hang your word lists up and practice, practice, practice. Repetition is boring for us, but not for your budding reader.