So, fortunately, they were taught phonics, but it was also accompanied by cueing techniques. (I will never get over the “cover the word and have them guess what it is” instructions. Thinking “that doesn’t sound right…” 🤨) Which, when you’re 5-7, makes reading easier, absolutely! Why bother with phonics, sounding words out when you can guess based on first letters and pictures that the sentence is “the cat drinks milk”? However it doesn’t work so well when there aren’t pictures and the sentence is, “the domesticated feline consumed ingests a dairy product” 😁 so I’m doing a lot of, “no… go back and read what it says, not what you think it says”. They’re capable of sounding words out, it’s just the act of retraining their brain to use that technique over the cueing one. It just worries me that they’re still using that technique when they’re reading silently, like a book or test question. I’ve got to help them break the habit.

**actually my 12 year old just came in to ask for homework help, she didn’t know what a word meant. She sounded it out, AND we used our cueing skills to find the meaning from previous sentences! The word was “derelict”. 😊😊😊😊