Lutherans have retained private confession and absolution (fallen into disuse some now, but many pastors in my denomination (LCMS) are working to bring it back into common use). It's not just about the psychological benefits of speaking repentance aloud (and hearing a personal, specifically-for-me absolution) for us, though - we believe it is a means of grace - that God for-real-and-true forgives our sins through the pastor declaring us absolved "in the stead and by the command of God". We do differ some from what I understand of Catholic confession, in that it's not about trying to confess *all* our sins (something we believe is impossible), but private confession is for confessing the sins that particularly trouble us.

I second this. I have a new 2nd grader who is a struggling reader and definitely does better with individual words than with paragraphs. I was having problems finding readers at the library, because of huge mismatch between our phonics program and the balanced literacy beginning readers - the ones that didn't have too many words she couldn't decode had too few words per page period. And I have a set of decodable reader booklets from Harcourt Mifflin (mom picked them up at a yard sale), but they didn't have enough practice - too few words per page at the lower decoding levels and too sharp an increase in the decoding load at the same time as they increased the words per page - and dd7.5 hit a wall. But this summer I ran across a list of school publisher readers that used the same basic progression as our phonics program and pieced together three of the series used. Best reading investment I've made since our phonics program itself :thumbup:. Dd7.5 started from the beginning, way below both her decoding level and below her words-on-the-page fluency level (for some easy, confidence-building practice), but by the second books in each series, she's still way below her decoding level, but is being stretched by the number of words on the page. It's been a wonderful fluency builder. The two series I like and we are using are the Merrill Linguistic Readers (set of 8 readers, A-H) and the SRA Basic Reading Series (set of 7 readers, A-F (level A is split into 2 books, part 1 and part 2); scope and sequence and list of titles is on pgs 7-8 of the linked pdf). They suffer some from educational pricing new ;), but I was able to get them used online for around $5-$10 a reader. I'm glad we have both - dd7.5 can use all the practice she can get - but my favorite is the SRA Basic Reading Series. The stories and the illustrations are quite humorous (as readers go) - dd7.5 reads them on her own. Also, I just got the Short Vowel Phonics readers from the library last night, and they look to have a similar combination of easy decoding combined with a lot of words on the page.

I take the first and third example as her seeking reassurance that what she fears is *not* actually true. I used to have a bad habit of throwing out worst-case scenarios when arguing with my dh, to provoke him into responding (he tends to do a turtle impersonation when people are mad at him) - figuring that I was lobbing a softball, so to speak, something that would be easy to refute, and something that he'd *want* to refute (if it weren't true), because it was a very unflattering-to-him view of the situation. Only he'd just continue sitting there like a stone, refusing to engage, and so I'd assume that what I thought was an off-the-wall worst-case scenario was apparently *actually the case*. And then I'd get madder - or in your mum's shoes, more anxious - and throw out something even more outrageous that was a new worst-case scenario based on the first one being true-ish. Lather, rinse, repeat, until (with dh) I hit on something so completely ridiculous that sanity reasserted itself and declared that no matter how it felt, seriously, *that* one wasn't possibly even in the ballpark. Or with others (more fear than anger) I ran from the relationship and dropped it for fear of what might be going on. Anyway, the more anxious I'm feeling, the more positive reassurance I need - because, yeah, there's nothing like anxiety (and depression) to make a person self-focused in a very negative-feeling way. When I feel more confident about a situation, I don't have the positive-reassurance-seeking thing going on - because I'm already genuinely assured about it. Or else my fears are within societal norms and my ability to deal with it is rational - I can just ask outright what's the case, in a casual way, instead of coming at it from a passive, indirect way. The covert requests for reassurance are covert because I'm scared what I will hear if I just ask. Only it backfires more often than not, because people don't hear my please-reassure-me-subtext and so don't offer reassurance, and I panic further, because I assume the silence means there was no true reassurance to offer, so my fears are in fact *true*, rooted in fact. I know it can be really frustrating to deal with a person who needs constant reassurance to allay their fears, but it really sucks to *be* that person, too. And with your mum's situation changing so drastically recently, she has a lot of rooted-in-reality reasons to feel unconfident about her position in your home. Giving her positive reassurance that whatever fear she voices isn't true would go a long way to helping her feel more confident, I think.

I agree that you can't *force* either to happen when the precursor developmental skills aren't there. But on the other hand, for non-neurotypical kids, where the precursor developmental skills *aren't* "just happening" on their own, you most certainly *can* explicitly work on the missing skills and build them up on purpose. (As I said, blending *doesn't* "just happen" in my family. My mom is in her 60s and can't blend; my sister is in her 30s and can't blend; I realized I couldn't blend in my 30s and have been using what I've learned to help my kids on myself; I taught my oldest dd to blend at age 9, *after* she was a fluent reader for over two years - even a year of pure phonics teaching (and a few years practicing) wasn't enough to get her blending.) So, in theory, why can't you do the same with neurotypical kids? Identify what skills they are missing, start at the beginning of the sequence, and - gently and in a child-friendly way - build them up one-by-one. I mean, I know why people mostly don't - explicitly working to build skills that usually develop naturally without intervention can be a *ton* more work than waiting and letting them happen naturally. So usually you only do it when it's clear that it's *not* going to happen naturally no matter how long you wait. But it does seem like you *could* do it if it mattered to you. Kind of gently encourage the development of each stage to happen earlier rather than later. With NT kids, it might not change the overall timing much from what "would have happened", but maybe it would - especially if you gently persist when kids plateau (as you do with non-NT kids) instead of giving up and waiting for it to happen naturally. That is what I think happens with most early teaching when it stops coming easily - people take a break instead of persisting. Which is understandable and may well be the best use of time and effort - it's hard work to be cheerfully and gently persistent in the face of no progress, especially when you don't "need" to be - when there's a real expectation it will come on its own sooner or later. That's the main difference I see between the non-obsessive, non-build-a-baby-genius approach to serious early learning and the typical approach to early learning - whether you value it enough to persist even when there's a) no *need* to do it (kid's not begging for it) and b) there's no obvious progress. Do you value it enough to keep going even if, in the end, it makes no measurable long-term difference?

I remember a poster here who had a blog about teaching young kids to read (starting around 18mo, aiming for reading fluently by age 5): https://teachingmybabytoread.com/static/ She isn't claiming that *all* kids can achieve that but that many can, and that all kids can learn *something* beneficial through child-friendly early reading instruction, even if they do not learn to read early.

For a slightly different perspective, my mom taught me to read as a 2yo (started around 18mo). She did 100% whole word teaching (it was how she learned herself, and the method in the "Teach Your Baby to Read" book she had), and per family stories, I was reading things I hadn't seen/learned before at 2y10m. I can't remember a time where I couldn't read, and I remember reading Trixie Belden books in kindergarten. I had no phonics until a smattering of early-Explode-the-Code type worksheets in 2nd, which were trivial, so I more-or-less intuited basic phonics before that point. I did test as highly gifted in school. My sister learned in a similar way on a similar timeline. When my oldest dd learned all her letters and sounds before she was two, I thought she might learn to read early, too. But I was staunch phonics-only (saw weaknesses in my reading skills, even though I was a confident and prolific reader), and didn't go the whole-word approach. I think dd10 could have learned early if I had gone whole word - she was learning words as wholes on her own and at 4yo completely confused dh and me about whether she was reading - she knew things she could only have learned from reading them, yet she could not blend or even connect the sounded-out /c/ /a/ /t/ with the whole word /cat/. I introduced the idea of beginning blending several times over the preschool years, but she was never "ready". I started teaching her phonics at 5.5yo anyway, and after a year on CVC words something clicked and she was reading. Reading almost entirely by sight (despite very strict phonics-only teaching), as it turned out - blending and other phonetic "reading readiness" skills *never* clicked for her (like they never clicked for me, and like they never clicked for my mom) - she failed the Barton pre-screening as a fluent reader. I've been spending her 3rd and 4th grade years covertly remediating those missing skills in the guise of spelling and cursive handwriting work (and painfully remediating my own missing skills as a thirtysomething adult). IDK what the moral of that story is. Other than I wonder if I knew then what I know now, if I could have taught those missing skills at 2-3yo, instead of waiting to 5.5 before starting to teach them - because those "reading readiness" skills weren't ever going to magically appear for my kids, not at any age. (Based on my experience with my oldest and my growing understanding of the phonemic processing challenges my family has (my middle likewise failed the Barton pre-screening, though prior to phonics instruction), I didn't even try to start prior to 5.5yo with either my middle or my youngest.)

My new 2nd grader wasn't able to do it alone - I walked her through it and she sort of got it by the end - but I wasn't surprised, as she's still in SM 1b and hasn't ever seen problems like that before. I expect that by the end of second grade she'd do fine. My 5th grader, otoh, thought it was trivial and easily solved it in the time it took her to read it.

I agree that this kind of substitution is characteristic of a more visual, whole-word approach to reading, but I disagree that the answer to a student completely ignoring phonetic "clues" in favor of context "clues" is to de-emphasize phonics (the apparent weak area). My experience is that visual kids who struggle in accurately seeing all the little bits on the page need *more* practice learning to see all the little bits, not less. My oldest dd was like the whole language poster child - naturally used grammar clues and context clues to bolster her weak decoding skills. I taught her 100% phonics, and she *still* ended up reading mostly by sight, with truly atrocious spelling. If you don't/can't pay attention to the little inside bits of words visually, and you can't hear the inside bits auditorily, then you can't spell visually *or* phonetically. So teaching her to spell (which is covertly remediating her reading) has involved teaching her to visually *pay attention* to *all* the little phonetic bits, as well as teaching her to be able to hear the sounds in words better. Something that helped make the little phonetic bits of words noticeable and somewhat interesting to my dd was the Spelling You See color-coded marking system (SYS teaches spelling through copywork and dictation, and I use the marking for all our other copywork/dictation and spelling work, too). The way they do it is to mark up the whole passage (yellow for vowel digraphs, green for y-as-a-vowel, purple for r-controlled vowels, blue for consonant digraphs, orange for silent letters, pink/red for prefixes/suffixes; we added brown for consonant blends, because my dds can't hear them well), then copy the passage (or part of the passage, if it's long) and mark up what you copied. SYS stays on the same passage for a week, marking it up each day and copying some/all of it, and then on Friday they mark up the passage again, but instead of copying it, you write it from dictation. So studied dictation, basically, with a nifty visual marking system as the base for the studying.

I think you are correct that she's seeing what she expects to see, that she's not paying enough attention to what's actually on the page to notice when it's contrary to expectations. My experience is that making (usually accurate) predictions is overall helpful to fluency - so long as you are still paying enough attention to what's actually on the page to notice right off when your prediction is false and so quickly correct it - that what you expect to see doesn't override what is there to be seen. A common way to teach kids to slow down and really focus on what's on the page phonetically is to use a notched index card. Cut a little rectangle out of a corner of the card, as tall as a single line of the book she's reading and about an inch wide. Have her slide it along as she reads, uncovering each word as she goes. If she starts to get a word wrong, stop right there and have her start at the beginning of the word and uncover each individual phonogram one-by-one, sounding out as she goes. It helps kids slow down and *pay attention* to each bit of each word, and to reinforce reading left-to-right and sounding out to decode (instead of guessing or filling in the blanks with what you expect to see).

'pnk' is missing a vowel, like she forgot to put it in or something. Every syllable has a vowel is taught in AAS 2, lesson 4.'crle' is more or less phonetically correct, but not using spellings you see in English. 'ur' is taught in AAS 3, lesson 7, and 'y' spelling /e/ at the end of words is AAS 3, lesson 8. 'orng' is sorta phonetically correct (that 'a' is barely said in some dialects - 'orange' can sound like a one-syllable word) and sorta visually correct (used a soft g instead of a 'j', but didn't put on the silent e that makes the g soft). Soft g was taught in AAS 2, lesson 8. 'beter' forgot to integrate syllable division rules with spelling; Dividing VCCV words into syllables is AAS 2, lesson 5, and open/closed syllables plus dividing VCV words is AAS 2, lesson 6. So it does look like she's not yet fluent in incorporating what she's learning in spelling with writing under pressure (in competitions). How does she do in her day-to-day, unpressured writing? Just as bad as competition writing? Or somewhat better? Also, if you show her the words and ask her if she thinks they are right, does she? (My oldest is a *horrible* speller, and will slap down any old thing when she gets uncertain, but she knows it's not right; and most spelling mistakes she catches when I have her read it aloud to me.) Doing sentence dictations - so writing in context - where you stop her when she starts getting a word wrong and help her think through the relevant rules - could be a big help. You could also add an individualized spelling list to your week - take words she's misspelled in her writing, make a list, and then go through them AAS-style, marking the phonograms and using the rules and such. Fluency takes time, and fluency in a pressured situation, where it really needs to be automatic, because there's no time to focus on the spelling because there's too much else going on, is going to take the longest to develop.

What level of AAS? And are the words she's missing in her writing ones she's learned in AAS, or ones that she hasn't learned yet? And what kinds of mistakes is she making? Are they phonetically correct (every phonogram used is a legit spelling for that sound) but she's choosing the wrong phonogram when there are multiple possiblities? Or are they not phonetically correct? I know one of the posters here, when her dd could spell during spelling but it didn't carry over to her writing, had success with doing lots of dictation - practicing the words in context, over and over.

Back 15 years ago, I had a "custom abridgment" for an engineering class. I guess it was supposed to save us money or something, idk - it cost $90, so still on the pricey side for books at the time, but the giant unabridged edition could have been $150, so maybe it was a savings of sorts. But what really *burned* me was that our custom abridgment for our particular class at our particular university - it did not contain one of the chapters that was taught :svengo:. We still had the full index (and maybe the full toc, too) so I was able to look up the topic and see where it was taught, only to find that we did not have the chapter itself. So very frustrating - esp as I *much* preferred being able to read the book and work examples on my own time instead of having to solely rely on what was said in class. (I once bought a text the professor said we didn't need, because his lectures were sufficient, just so I could have a book to study from.)

I haven't done a whole lot of writing with dd10 (been focusing more on improving her spelling, which has gone from truly horrific to garden-variety bad over the past year). We're still slowly going through WWE2 (we're about halfway through after a year), which is about her speed, both in terms of summarizing ability and amount of writing involved. Grammar-wise this year I've added FLL3 (which she's not really a fan of so far) and Story Grammar (which she likes). I've modified the amount of writing required for both FLL and SG - writing 1/4 sentences for FLL and 2/4 for SG (doing the others orally). Anyway, I'd like to add in some non-WWE writing, something with "fun-factor" but that's also laid out in a very step-by-step, hand-holding way (I love the open-and-go factor and step-by-step, no-leaps organization of the WWE workbooks). In terms of what she finds fun, she loves the "sentences from real authors" aspect of Story Grammar, and loves stories in general (which is why she doesn't mind WWE despite it hitting weak areas). She's a strong and prolific reader, reads above her grade level, but her ability to orally compose isn't strong and her physical writing ability is weak but improving. She's overwhelmed by too-small spaces to write in (she loudly maintains that the writers of SM IP are stupid for not giving remotely enough space to write out the work for word problems - IP went so much better once I had her do the problems on graph paper instead of in the book). And her willingness to write depends both on her interest in the topic and how fatigued she is - it can be all over the map, but even at it's best I think she's way behind would be expected in public school. Which is why I want to gently increase the amount of writing we are doing, both in terms of handwriting and composing. In terms of things I already have laying around because of impulse buying for future use (but haven't really meaningfully looked at), I have: *the main BW book, *Classical Writing Aesop and Homer *IEW's Blended Writing Through Structure and Style (the book precursor to the TWSS DVDs) and Bible-Based Writing Lessons *Analyze, Organize, Write, by Whimbey & Johnson Obviously, if any of those would be good choices, I'd prefer to be pointed to something I already have, kwim? But I really do strongly prefer something that is: a) well laid out in terms of "do this on day 1, do this on day 2" (open-and-go, doesn't require a lot of advance planning or prep on my part - I'm not strong in teaching writing) b) very clear and step-by-step and not overwhelming in terms of what it asks the student to do c) involves stories and models - dd10 loves stories, and is taking well to the imitation in SG d) but not so focused on straight copywork - I know dd10's not a strong writer in any sense, but we have so much copywork in what we have and I think dd10's getting a little tired of it - looking for a little more imitation-with-creativity than straight copywork, I think. Any thoughts?

If you mean a non-Trinitarian God, then, yes, none of the poll choices fit. But if you mean all three Persons of the Trinity acting together, then choosing all three Persons *does* fit, at least wrt what I meant when making the poll.

Depends what you mean by "subjective". If you consider the events themselves to have been objectively real, supernatural workings that really happened in a factual sense - even if you cannot objectively prove them to others even a little bit - then it counts for the poll in both categories. If you consider the events themselves to have been subjective in a "God was supernaturally bringing my attention to the supernatural significance of a natural event", then it just counts under "within believers". If you consider the events themselves to have been subjective in a "God was naturally bringing my attention to the supernatural significance of a natural event", then it doesn't count under either category. Clear as mud? ;) Eta: basically, if *you* believe it is objectively possible for God to have supernaturally acted in that way - that whatever it was "really happened" in the same way that your getting out of bed in the morning really happened - then it counts for the purposes of the poll, even if your ability to prove or even explain it to others is nil.

In case you are curious, I found it in the Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article III.54.

I learned relatively recently (to my surprise) that my church (Lutheran) teaches that believers are indwelt by the whole Trinity, based on 1 Cor 3:16-17 (that Christians are "God's temple" - we understand that to mean Father, Son & Spirit - that "God's Spirit" doesn't dwell in us in a way that separates the presence of the Spirit from the presence of the other members of the Trinity). Thank you :). There's just something about that perplexed "but...where'd the mouse go?" expression that I thought was so cute every time I read that story to my kids (although now I'm blanking on the name of the story :doh - Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Miss M_____" - I keep wanting to fill in "Miss Marple", but that's from the wrong British author ;). Eta: Ha! I just remembered - it's Miss *Moppet*.)

Probably? General revelation and special revelation aren't really terms my tradition uses much; I've read about them and I *think* they apply, but my understanding of them is wrapped up in the theory I'm testing here. IOW, how generic you connects those terms to my question is actually really pertinent to what I'm trying to find out. I'm trying to figure out how "mixy" people see the supernatural and the natural, particularly in terms of what that means for the possibility and "normality" of God's beyond-natural presence and activity in the natural world. If that helps any.

Working supernaturally through natural means totally counts as working supernaturally for poll purposes, so long as God's supernatural work is driving the process and is occurring right now (and not only in the past). What doesn't count for poll purposes is where God's supernatural presence is behind natural laws in such a way that it is functionally indistinguishable from His absence - that generic you doesn't believe that God does anything different from what natural laws would have done anyway. Also, believing that God supernaturally initiated natural laws at creation that then operated apart from continual, ongoing supernatural involvement doesn't count for poll purposes, either. Basically, I'm trying to get at whether people consider God to be supernaturally active in the world in a way that makes a concrete, material difference. If that helps any.

My question has to do with what you believe God is doing *supernaturally* on earth, and in believers. Specifically: which Person or Person(s) of the Trinity (if any) are supernaturally present and active out in the material world? (God's presence/activity in and through the sacramental elements counts here, including Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist.) And which Persons are supernaturally present and active within believers? *Supernatural* is key here - if you believe God is responsible but works *purely* through natural means, then it doesn't count for the purposes of this poll. If possible, I'd love posts giving a brief explanation of your answer - what's each Person of the Trinity doing and not doing, both out in the created world, and within believers? (I have a theory about a trend in the answers.). Eta: please include your denomination if possible. Feel free to ask for clarification as needed. Also, I'm not looking to debate answers - just to see what they are and try to understand the range of answers. Thank you so much for helping me out :). ETA: In response to a comment, working supernaturally through natural means totally counts as working supernaturally for poll purposes, so long as you understand God's supernatural work to be driving the process and that supernatural activity is occurring right now, in the present (and not only in the past). What doesn't count for poll purposes is where God's supernatural presence is behind natural laws in such a way that it is functionally indistinguishable from His absence - that generic you doesn't believe that God does anything different from what natural laws would have done anyway. Also, believing that God supernaturally initiated natural laws at creation that then operate apart from continual, ongoing supernatural involvement doesn't count for poll purposes, either. Basically, I'm trying to get at whether people consider God to be supernaturally active in the world in a way that makes a concrete, material difference. If that helps any.

Since I mentioned the phonetically-arranged sight word list a few times, here's the link: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html :) Even though working through it didn't make library readers work for fluency practice, it has been helpful in other ways. She can "use" her reading skills in daily life a lot more. A biggie is that she can now read instructions in her math workbook without help, which makes her far more independent in math. (Before she was independent on the math, but needed me right there to read her the problems.) She enjoys being able to read beginning readers, and just in general I find she's better able to tackle the random stuff that comes her way. I wouldn't *start* here, but after a solid beginning, it opens up a lot to be able to read the standard "sight words".

I read it several years ago (there's a free pdf on eric.gov), and I found it interesting - thought about modifying it for a pure phonics-only approach. I was hesitant about the grammar and picture clues when I read it (and reducing decoding to using phonics "clues" alongside other non-phonetic clues), and subsequent experience teaching my girls has only confirmed it. My oldest was the whole language poster child - naturally used grammar and picture clues to bolster her weak decoding skills - and ended up being a sight reader *despite* my teaching her a very pure phonics-only approach (I am covertly remediating that in her spelling). She heavily resisted sounding out and hated words in isolation (no context clues to aid decoding), and I cannot imagine how much worse it would have been if she'd been officially *encouraged* to use grammar/picture clues *instead* of decoding. (I say this now, but I admit, when I was teaching her and watching her struggle so much with phonics - we were a full year on CVC words - *knowing* the whole time that she'd *fly* if I did whole language - I regularly doubted myself and wondered if I should really stay so strict with phonics-only. But looking back, I'm *so* thankful I stuck to phonics-only. She subverted enough of my phonics teaching as it was, picked up enough bad sight habits as it was - I only wish I knew then what I know now. But I'm running her through the exact same exercises as middle dd - billed as spelling/cursive practice instead of as reading practice - and it's helping her out a ton. (Her spelling has been upgraded to garden-variety bad instead of the off-the-charts horrifyingness it used to be, and I live in hope it may one day be genuinely *good*.)) ~*~ I think there's a lot to be said for grammar and picture clues when it comes to *comprehension* - just not in place of *decoding*, kwim? And intuiting grammar clues on the fly is very helpful for fluency - so long as your decoding is strong and can quickly raise a red flag when your grammar expectation turns out to be *wrong*. My oldest had zero comprehension issues - used comprehension to bolster her weak decoding skills (and to subvert my attempts to have her exercise her weak decoding skills), so I never worried about teaching them to her. With my middle, who has been far less ready to turn to picture clues and slower at using grammar clues (though I've noticed her using grammar expectations recently, anticipating what the text will say based on context clues, including sentence structure), I've wondered when/if I should explicitly bring them up. So far all I've done is explicitly discuss what a pronoun is referring to - teach her that a pronoun can reference something in a previous sentence - and practice identifying them. (One of the reasons I love Let's Read - they work in that sort of grammatical structure pretty early and provide a lot of practice.) But I do that in the context of comprehension, not decoding. Reading is absolutely more than decoding - but that doesn't mean it's ok to sideline decoding so long as you can comprehend something without it, kwim? ~*~ So I've used bits and bobs of the book in my teaching, but I didn't use the actual method. Part of that is my aforementioned disagreements wrt using non-phonetic clues to supplement *decoding* - instead of to help with *comprehension*. But part of it was that, idk, the method sounded neat and all but required a lot more work to set up and record-keeping and all than I wanted to do. (But I'm pretty sure the method I fell into uses at *least* as much record-keeping - it just somehow is more intuitive and all for me.) And in retrospect it would have never worked for my kids anyway (not as a phonics-only approach, anyway), as they needed one pattern at a time with a lot of practice, and going straight to uncontrolled text would have been too much. There's an interesting (free) approach to using Bob books to teach reading that seems a lot like a phonics-only version of Teach Your Child to Read with Children's Books: http://www.teachingwithbob.com/

My oldest dd read Timothy Zahn's Dragonback series and Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series in 4th. I've read and enjoyed them both myself.

Let's Read was written by a linguist, and it shows - he paid attention to all the little details, far more than any other program I've seen (with the possible exception of Webster's Speller). So many phonics programs introduce plural 's' without bothering to distinguish between when the 's' sounds like /s/ and when it sounds like /z/ - it doesn't tend to trip up neurotypical native speakers, but it can mess up kids who struggle (or non-native speakers) - but our program clearly teaches them separately, which I appreciate so much. There's many other examples, too, where too many phonics programs just gloss over or flat out ignore phonetic differences, but our program notices and keeps them distinct. And also, I've noticed that they gradually introduce grammar patterns in the practice reading - they are carefully building up sentence complexity and teaching grammar cues just as much as they are teaching phonics. The authors just have put so much expertise and knowledge and attention to detail into this program - it's spoiled me for most anything else ;). (My poor dh suffers from my frequent rants about crappy, lazy, substandard so-called "phonics" readers :lol:.)

I'm using Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach: https://smile.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhart/dp/0814334555/ (I have the 1961 edition, not the 2010 edition - idk if it makes any difference). It has an introductory chapter with the history of writing systems (very interesting), and then a discussion of how to use the book. The book's approach is an interesting combination of whole word and phonics (teach words as wholes, but in a progression that develops intuitive phonetic knowledge), but I go with the sound-out-and-blend traditional phonics approach instead. ETA: But I've found that the hallmarks of their approach - one pattern at a time with lots of practice, including practicing distinguishing between "minimal pairs" (man/min, man/mat) - works really well with kids who find blending a struggle (like mine) or who tend to guess or ignore small differences (also like mine). The bulk of the book is a carefully-thought-out progression of reading material (learning the most common sound of each phonogram first, with plenty of practice before introducing alternate sounds) - it's very much learn to read by reading - starting with the -an family and working through all the short-a CVC words, family by family, and then doing the same with the other short vowels. Each lesson has a list of new words to learn, all which follow a particular phonetic pattern, and then fully decodable reading practice (sentences, then paragraphs, and later stories) which use the new words plus previously learned words. The first 36 lessons are on CVC words (teaching about 270 or so words); the next section does blends (~18 lessons and 450 words) and common consonant digraphs (~17 lessons and 450 words); the next section does common vowel digraphs (~30 lessons and 550 words). That's the first 40% or so of the book; after that begins alternate and irregular spellings. For the "regular" spellings, they include a *lot* of words, common and uncommon, so kids get a lot of practice with the common spelling (I've looked up several that *I* didn't know). But for alternate and irregular spellings, they only include common-ish words worth learning. It doesn't explicitly teach any rules, but implicitly teaches them (purposefully) through its carefully arranged patterns, which makes it very easy to include them if you want. (I only just started to appreciate the rules as such - learning via pattern instead of explicitly applying rules was very much up my alley - and I've noticed that my kids are helped very much by first learning individual patterns with lots of practice before moving to mixed practice.)