g her phonetics. When I work with her, I don't even tell her that we're working on reading because I learned with my oldest daughter that that can be kind of scary - she thought that "reading" was something that only older children could do. So now that my youngest is in school, I work with her everyday on learning how the letters sound. That may seem like a very easy task, but it's a huge leap for kids.
This mother is following a well-established and praised path not only in starting off with phonetics but in understanding how difficult grasping the basics of phonetics can be for a child: It's not so much that it is difficult for a child to memorize that the letter "B" makes the first sound in "boy" but rather that there is a substantial cognitive leap to be made in understanding that letters are sounds (http://members.tripod.com/~Patricia_F/prek.html).
The use of phonetics to teach reading has made a comeback beginning about a decade ago, replacing a method of teaching reading by teaching children entire words at a time (a method called "whole language") and concentrating on entire texts rather than individual letters and their sounds. For those who grew up learning to read through phonetics, this may sound counter-intuitive (and indeed to some extent
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