Giving Back
In addition to supporting PPA Charities' partnership with Operation Smile, Alpharetta Photography, LLC is actively engaged in efforts to improve literacy rates.  Currently 68% of fourth graders read below grade level, but instruction in comprehensive phonics has shown dramatic results.  A new literacy resource designed for busy parents, co-authored by Alpharetta Photography's founder, is described below.

Sight Words Book Helps Busy Parents Teach Emerging Readers

New phonics guide helps busy parents provide expert instruction to emerging readers, leveraging the sight words to unlock keys to confident reading and spelling.

 Alpharetta, GA – November 15   The 315 Dolch high frequency words are a focal point of early reading education.  They represent over 50% of a typical text, making the ability to read them instantly on sight essential for reading comprehension.
      Unfortunately, most of these words appear to be exceptions for an emerging reader who knows only the primary sound of each letter.  Yet, 93% of the Dolch words - and 98% of all English words - are phonetically regular.  They simply require additional instruction on how our language works. 
     These essential rules have been carefully laid out in a new publication from Pedia Learning that presents phonetic concepts at work in the 315 Dolch words in 66 simple lessons.  The lessons are designed for a busy parent to deliver without any preparation just by reading aloud the rule for each page and helping the child sound out the sample words. 
     Sounding Out the Sight Words: A Guide to Teaching the Dolch Words through Phonics was written as a tool for busy parents and caregivers seeking to provide a child with a solid foundation for reading and spelling.  It is a collaboration between Denise Eide, author of Uncovering the Logic of English and founder of Logic of English, and Cindy Kringelis.  Kringelis was inspired by Eide’s book to build a tool to present its concepts in a simple and accessible format for parents of emerging readers.
     “We would never dream of teaching kids to memorize math problems "by sight" without teaching them what the numbers mean,” Eide writes in her blog. “Learning why words are spelled the way they are makes the process of learning to read and spell new words far more efficient and engages students' critical thinking skills.”
     As proficient readers, parents may have lost sight of how simple words such as "is" and "to" can be tricky for an emerging reader.  Parents may have forgotten - or perhaps were never taught themselves - the simple explanations for why letters behave as they do.  With the methodical approach in this booklet, the parent can deliver sound instruction while refreshing on the concepts necessary to provide expert coaching as the child learns to read and write with ease.
     Some children who are adept at simply memorizing words in the early years begin to struggle in later elementary as vocabulary demands increase.  In contrast, a student taught the phonetic concepts at work in the Dolch words is well prepared to handle such vocabulary growth, needing instruction on a limited number of remaining concepts to achieve proficiency with the entire language.
   The concepts necessary to decode the Dolch words provide the student with a solid foundation for reading and spelling not just the Dolch words, but thousands of others.  In fact, the concepts at work in the Dolch words represent over half of the all the concepts needed to decode 98% of English words.
↑Back to Top