How to Use Phonics to Teach Reading

Aimee Eucce is our guest expert, talking about teaching reading with a phonic-focused approach called Play 'n Talk. It's a skills-based program so it works for any age child who needs these skills. Aimee has learning challenges that made reading hard, but this program worked for her as a child, and now she uses it with her own children.

Janna Koch (00:36): Welcome to Homeschool Your Way. I'm your host, Janna Koch. I'm the community manager at BookShark. Today, I'm joined with Aimee Eucce. We're going to be talking about not only homeschooling in her own home, but Aimee is a second generation homeschooler and she has the unique perspective of being the now owner of a program called Play 'n Talk. We're going to get into all that, but first, let me introduce you to Aimee. Hi, Aimee.

Aimee Eucce (01:00): Hello.

Janna Koch (01:02): Thanks so much for being here today.

Aimee Eucce (01:04): Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Janna Koch (01:07): Let's take some of that excitement and jump right into, how did you get into homeschooling?

Aimee Eucce (01:12): Well, I mean, you already mentioned I'm a second generation homeschooler. It feels like I've been homeschooling forever, but I guess the origin story of homeschooling for me would be when my mom tried to put me in a Montessori preschool when I was about four. She drove me there. She dropped me off. She'd come home and she'd get a call, "Mrs. Friend, your daughter has spiked a fever. Can you please come pick her up?" Yes, I know. I did that every day until she finally pulled me out of the Montessori preschool. I was a little bit of a difficult... I'm the first of four kids, so I gave my mom a little bit of a run for her money and that's when she decided to homeschool me. I've been homeschooling pretty much ever since.

Janna Koch (01:58): You're just paving the way for her so when child two, three, and four came through, she would just go sailing on that road that you smoothed out for her so quickly, it sounds like.

Aimee Eucce (02:10): I've somewhat. Yes.

Janna Koch (02:13): So in your homeschooling experience, I know the people who have listened to me before on the podcast or watched the videos, I was a reluctant homeschooler for my own children. I was homeschooled myself. I had a great experience. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it, but I never saw myself homeschooling my own kids. What about you? Were you gung ho from the beginning that was what you were going to do?

Aimee Eucce (02:35): Yeah, I was gung ho from the beginning. I was one of those I married a little bit later and so I had kids a little bit later. I'd had a great career in corporate and I really just wanted to be home with my kiddos and just be there for everything. So yeah, I really wanted to do it. It's in my heart. I know what curriculum I like. I know what curriculum I don't like. I know what teaching styles I like, because I mean, my mom tried it all on me. I was homeschooled in the '80s, so I was in the total pioneering days. We didn't have a lot of curriculum back then, but my mom tried it all on us. And so I know that I tend to go towards certain styles, not only for receiving as a student, but also for teaching as a mom as well.

Janna Koch (03:21): Yeah. I like to say that when people ask me about my own homeschool experience, I said I was homeschooling before it was trendy. We were kind of looked at as the weird kids that people would be like, "Oh, well, can you socialize?" And my common response would be like, "Well, I'm talking to you. So obviously I can socialize."

Aimee Eucce (03:40): No, the question is, if your mom told you... This is what my mom used to tell us, but we also were homeschooled in California. So a little bit different, but my mom would say, "Okay, it's not two o'clock yet. You are not allowed to go outside until two o'clock because the truant officer may pick you up."

Janna Koch (03:56): Wow. No, I never got that.

Aimee Eucce (03:58): Yeah, that's the "You know you were homeschooled in the '80s if..."

Janna Koch (04:03): Yeah, homeschooled in the '80s in California. Yes.

Aimee Eucce (04:05): In California, yes. Let me... Yes. Yes.

Janna Koch (04:07): Yeah. I have to tell you that when you were saying that I pictured Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when the guy went around the village, rounding up the children, if you can recall.

Aimee Eucce (04:17): I think that's how I pictured it in my mind as well.

Janna Koch (04:21): Very, very afraid. Needed to stay inside the...

Aimee Eucce (04:24): Run. He's coming.

Janna Koch (04:25): Yes. Oh my gosh. Wow. I'm so glad we've moved beyond that now in homeschooling, right?

Aimee Eucce (04:31): Yes.

Janna Koch (04:31): There's been a resurgence of homeschooling and COVID kind of propelled a lot of people into this arena that maybe we weren't even expecting. And so now we get to welcome with open arms all of those who are new to this type of schooling and get to share our fun experiences, not only our own stories, but now we get to talk about our kids and the therapy that they will need later on in life, which is totally fine. I joke and say we don't save for wedding funds in my home with my three girls. We save for therapy.

Aimee Eucce (05:02): That's hilarious.

Janna Koch (05:03): We're getting it covered. We're getting it covered. Well, why don't you share a homeschool hack with our listeners?

Aimee Eucce (05:08): Okay. I've got one for those with younger kiddos like myself and those with older kiddos, because I have a four and a seven year old. So I'm fully in the Play-Doh and the pipe cleaning and pipe cleaners and all that stuff. So for those with older kiddos, if you can gamify, gamify anything and everything, it will make homeschooling go so much faster. And those with younger kiddos, if you can turn it into some sort of play-based learning experience, they will just love it. What I mean by both of those would be like, when we're practicing letters for the younger kiddos, I'm doing letters in Play-Doh, we're doing letters with pipe cleaners, we're doing letters in sand, we're doing letters in dirt. We're doing all sorts of experiential type things. And then for those with older kiddos, take the Nerf gun and start shooting at blends when you're practicing your blends. Take everything and gamify or make it into play.

Janna Koch (06:04): Well, I think that's a great lead into the program that you now champion for Play 'n Talk. So let's talk about Play 'n Talk.

Aimee Eucce (06:15): No pun intended. Definitely. Well, Play 'n Talk, it's actually really interesting because I actually learned how to read with Play 'n Talk when I was five. My mom found it a little bit kind of out of desperation honestly, because I had just been diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD, and a slight auditory processing delay. Experts at that time, which they didn't know as much as they know today, but then they had told me that I would never read past the sixth grade level. So my mom, pretty much like any homeschooling parent, was like, "No, not my daughter." And she went and researched and she found this phonics program Play 'n Talk and she bought it on a payment plan on a pastor salary. It was a little bit out of her reach at that point so she dutifully paid every month for it. She put me through it. It takes most kiddos two years to go through. It did take me three. So it took me a little bit longer. But by the time I finished, I was reading at a college level and I was spelling at a sixth grade level.

Janna Koch (07:19): Wow. I can't even spell at a sixth grade level, Aimee. So I might need a crash course in Play n' Talk.

Aimee Eucce (07:28): You can come teach my kids if you like. No. So fast forward a few years because that was quite a while ago, they had closed down for a period of time because the owner or the founder had passed away and her kiddos, they had their own companies, nobody wanted to run it. It came towards me starting to teach my kiddos to read with that program and I only wanted to teach my kids to read with Play 'n Talk. And so I approached the family and I asked them if I could bring the company back. So when COVID hit literally in 2020, I relaunched Play 'n Talk after it had been closed from 2007 to 2020.

Janna Koch (08:10): Wow.

Aimee Eucce (08:10): So a slight hiatus and I brought it back. I had a baby, a third baby, essentially. I have two kiddos, a four and a half year old daughter and an almost seven year old son. And then a third baby, which is Play n' Talk.

Janna Koch (08:26): How exciting that you were given this opportunity to resurge a program that had gone out of print that was something that you were so passionate about because it had helped you all those years ago?

Aimee Eucce (08:39): I couldn't let it die. I couldn't let it... It's been all around for 60 years. Now that I've taken over the company, I have bankers boxes. I don't even know what to do with them, but bankers boxes full of testimonials from schools, from private schools, from homeschoolers. I just have bankers boxes full of these handwritten letters, typed letters, emails, I mean, everything. They're such a rich history. The program was actually originally developed out of the Isabelle Buckley School in Beverly Hills. The founder, Dr. Marie LeDoux, she had her kiddos in that school. I think they were ages like eight and 10 at the time. They were reading out of the wall street journal and understanding it. And she's like, "How is that possible?" So she went to their school to figure out what they were doing and she found that they had developed this amazing program. They surveyed all of the country and they found the best of the best. They created their own program.

Aimee Eucce (09:42): And so she, with their permission, created a program off of that program, but she also did the additional work of contacting every one room schoolhouse still in existence at that time back in the '60s and she found out how they taught their kiddos how to read with phonics. And so she compiled everything and she launched this program. It's been 60 years of success. It's just such an amazing rich history.

Janna Koch (10:08): I would say as a homeschool parent who was reluctant and then I didn't actually have to teach my children how to read, which I was like, "Whew, okay. I dodged that bullet." But for parents, that is one of their biggest concerns. "How am I going to teach my child the basics of reading and writing and spelling and these things?" And so I love that we have this opportunity to share with families who are looking for a program that is very much based in play. So why don't you give us an idea of how the program works?

Aimee Eucce (10:42): Definitely. So, as I mentioned, it's a two-year program and it's only 20 minutes a day. So what we do is we separate the 20 minutes into two 10-minute lessons. We do that because for the younger learners... Let me step back, this is a skill-based curriculum. So it's not age-based. A lot of parents ask me, "Is it good for my two-year-old? Is it good for my three-year-old? How about my 12-year-old that's struggling with spelling and reading? How about my 15 year old? So it's a skill-based curriculum. It can work with any of the kiddos. The best thing is that it is non-consumable as well. So we have a lot of families that will purchase it once and they'll use it with all of their kiddos. A lot of times they'll have an older kiddo and we'll tell them to have them teach the younger kiddos so that it kind of saves their ego a bit and it helps their spelling and helps their reading while teaching the younger kiddos.

Aimee Eucce (11:34):

The thing is is that they're not actually teaching. It's teach-in. Because we have over 210 audio lessons. So the teacher's not the parent, the teacher is actually on the recording. So all the parent does is facilitate to make sure the kiddo has their book open. So they're looking at their book, they're listening to the teacher teach, they're interacting with the teacher speaking. So they're hearing it, they're speaking it, they're seeing it. And they do that for 10 minutes. And then they go off, take a break. And then they do a 10-minute game. So it's all play based, everything. I mean, we have several different games. We reinforce every phonetic concept that we teach several different ways.

Janna Koch (12:09): I think that is exactly what most parents are looking for, right? They are looking for a way to engage their children in different types of activities. Music is one of those things that I have been very aware of that the public school is getting away from. And yet there are studies that prove that when you learn something in a song or have music tied to it, it sticks. I mean, you and I probably could go back decades thinking of jingles from television shows and advertisements that all of a sudden, I even now I'll hear it and I'll sing along and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how did I remember that?" But it's one of those teaching styles that I don't think is utilized nearly as much, I think, in modern education. I'm glad to hear that there is some resurgence with that in your program.

Janna Koch (13:02): What are some of the feedback that you get from maybe some modern families when they hear that it's an audio lesson and there is singing and clapping? Because it's kind of a lost art, are you getting good feedback from your families?

Aimee Eucce (13:18): We are getting excellent feedback. And also, we have it so it's kind of developmentally at different stages. So most of the singing actually happens in the beginning of the program, which is called Sing 'n Sound. That's where we actually teach the alphabet and we teach their sounds. Interestingly enough, and a lot of parents will actually ask me, "Do you teach all of the sounds up front?" And we don't actually. We hold off on the schwa. We teach the basics, the long and the short. The reason is that our programs are actually designed to build self-confidence for kiddos, especially those that have maybe experienced some challenges in their reading and they're doing this for a remedial thing. We really want them to know their long and short vowel sounds so that when we start to build three letter words in the beginning, they're able to actually pick it up and they feel confident in what they're doing so they're excited to take the next challenge and tackle the next one.

Aimee Eucce (14:11): So we do what we call spiral learning, where they master a new concept and then they build upon it. And then they master another one and they build upon it. So it's a little bit different, but it's worked for over 60 years. I have four and five year old little girls that after only one year of using our program, they're reading at fifth grade level.

Janna Koch (14:31): Yeah.

Aimee Eucce (14:33): It's insane. I wish that I was doing that, but like I said, for me, it took me a little bit longer because of the learning challenges. But the beautiful thing is we have so many kiddos with learning challenges and they just excel too. It takes them a little... Each person goes on their own journey in terms of how long it takes them. It's not a marathon. I mean, it's not a race, it's actually a marathon.

Janna Koch (14:55): Yeah. I think that we should just probably hashtag that and make some t-shirts about homeschooling in general, that if you expect it to be a sprint and to get it all done, you're going to be sorely disappointed because it does take years. You talk about curriculum and this being around for as long as it has been, but even curriculum developers, it takes a long time to develop these things. And so when they're already done for you, we then, as parents, need to understand that it still takes time for our children to then grasp these concepts. I know I've talked to plenty of parents who are frustrated because they feel like their children aren't where they should be.

Janna Koch (15:35): One of the biggest things I think that we need to get away from in homeschooling or education in general is there is no should. We don't need to do that to our kids. They are where they are at and then we get to celebrate that and watch them grow from there. And so when we have challenges with reading and spelling in these other areas, Math, I mean, like you said, each child's individual so we will have challenges in different areas, that it is a process that instead of being anxious as parents that maybe we are doing something wrong, we just need to trust the process. And if it takes two or maybe three years, if your child doesn't end up reading until they are 12, that's okay too. Just to give parents that encouragement that there is help out there, but there is no reason to assume that something is wrong with you or your child just because something hasn't clicked just yet.

Janna Koch (19:33): Yeah. Well, I love that you say it's skill-based and to be aware of readiness in your children, because I think in the world of Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and you see and you hear stories about children reading at three and five year olds completing Harry Potter, I think as an average parent, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what am I doing wrong with my kids? They are still putting boogers on the walls. I don't know. Is that any indication of my parenting or homeschooling in any way?" But there is no right age. There is no "It must be done by now or else."

Janna Koch (20:14): And I think that is something that is comforting to hear, especially if you're coming into homeschool that... Just don't worry so much about what everyone else is doing, because I think that robs us of the joy when we are homeschooling our children because we start to compare and say, "Oh, I heard so and so's kids already doing this." And then you miss the beautiful things that your own children are doing, because you're so worried that they're not keeping up with somebody else's kids. And they were never created to keep up with someone else's kids.

Aimee Eucce (20:45): I get it. It is so hard. I mean, as a homeschooling mom myself, I have one of my best friends who we hang out with all the time. She's been teaching her daughter to write for the last two years. So she's just turning seven. So since she was five. But I purposely held off because I've seen research studies and I've seen actual x-rays of kids' hands at five and seven. I've seen that the five year old's hand, they're not fully formed. There's laxity in the tendons, the bones aren't fully formed. I've seen that and the difference of a seven year old who's hand is fully formed. So actually I held off on teaching my son printing and writing. It was so hard because his little friend was writing complete copy sentences, everything.

Aimee Eucce (21:34): My son's grandmother kept saying, "Oh, can you write your name yet?" And I was like, "Nope, we haven't taught him yet." But I stood up for what I believed in for my kiddo. The beautiful thing is we've started writing now that he's almost seven and he's writing it perfectly. So waiting for him was the right thing. But every parent has to decide what's right for each of their kiddos, because every single one of them, they're all different.

Janna Koch (21:59): Right. And your daughter, she may on her own, pick up that [inaudible 00:22:04] pencil, right?

Aimee Eucce (22:04): She is. She is.

Janna Koch (22:04): And start writing.

Aimee Eucce (22:05): Yes. And she's my opposite. So she's ready and she's doing it right now. She's writing her name. She's doing her letters. So it just depends. Every child is different. Just when you think you get homeschooling down with one, oh, the next one totally shifts it, but that's kind of the beauty of the adventure.

Janna Koch (22:22): Yeah. And if we can keep in mind that it is an adventure. That it isn't a problem that needs to be solved, that it's not a chore that has to be done. Because when you start to feel that way really about anything in life, you start to dread it, right. You're like, "Ugh, Why am I doing this?" Or, "I guess I have to get it done today." And your children pick up. I know my kids pick up on that all the time. Like, "Ugh, I'm not really feeling it today, mom." And I can just be honest so I'm like, "I'm not. Let's watch a movie." We'll call it a documentary and school's done for the day. It's those times that they remember and that they see that, you know what? You're not always going to be 100%. You're not always on. You're not going to master everything the first time. And that's all okay. That is part of learning. And learning for learning's sake is important. It's not learning to achieve something, right?

Aimee Eucce (23:17): Yeah.

Janna Koch (23:17):And I think, again, as we're coming out of this public school era thinking like, "Okay, well test scores are important. Well, where are the tests?" "Well, there are no tests." "How can there not be any tests?" That really creeps people out because it's out of the norm. And, "Well, how do you know they're learning?" I'm like, "Because I talk to my kids." I don't know. If you really want to confuse somebody, just let them know you're not testing your kids and that'll really confuse them. Now that being said, let's talk about Play 'n Talk. Are there tests?

Aimee Eucce (23:49): No, there's no tests.

Janna Koch (23:51): Okay, good. Phew!

Aimee Eucce (23:53): There's one requirement in Play 'n Talk where you have to actually make sure that they master something. And that is right before when they finish Sing 'n Sound and they're ready to move into the main part of the program, you do have to make sure that they know all of their letters, upper and lowercase, and they know their sounds. But we have taught them that. So as long as you know that, which you do because you're the one homeschooling them, then you can move on to the main part of the program. But that's it. Everything else, you just take it at their pace and you just have fun. That's the main part. It's not supposed to be tedious. It's not supposed to be hard. That's why it's two 10-minute lessons a day. So two 10-minute lessons a day, and in two years kiddos are reading up to a college level afterwards and spelling at a sixth grade level.

Aimee Eucce (24:35): Let me put it this way. The sixth grade level thing, I need to actually re-look at those spelling words because the last time I looked, superorbital was not a sixth grade word. This was sixth grade 60 years ago when we developed it.

Janna Koch (24:48): Right. Right. I was going to say, I think I recall when I was in college 20 some years ago and one of the requirements in the class I was taking was we each had to get the Magazine Time. And so that was what we used to critically think and analyze and stuff, and later on found out that Time was written for about an eighth grade level reader. And here we were in college thinking that we were such big philosophers with our analytics of these articles that... And I think too, sometimes for someone like me, I'm like, "Okay, why would I want my five year old reading at college level? I'm not going to sit them down with a college book and say, 'Here you go. Have fun'." So explain that just a little bit to our listeners. What does that actually mean?

Aimee Eucce (25:35): So we give them the tools. So we teach them all the rules and the exceptions to the rules. We actually don't teach any sight words, which is really different from most programs. And that's because we really do comprehensively cover every single rule and we teach them in rhymes so kids can understand and they remember them. So yes, if you set them down with your college text, they're not going to have the understanding of everything they're reading because developmentally they're not there yet. But they will actually be able to, what we call, decode. Because they know all the rules and the exceptions to the rules, they can decode all of the words there.

Janna Koch (26:09): Okay.

Aimee Eucce (26:10): And it is huge. To this day, I have an excellent spelling vocabulary. My husband asked me all the time, "Honey, how do you spell this?" Because my husband went to public school and wasn't homeschooled like me. He wasn't taught phonics unfortunately because phonics has not been taught in schools for over 40 years. So yes, they will be able to decode. They will be able to read those words of a college text. Not understand them, but really all it means is that they can pretty much read everything. So you can, at the end of Play 'n Talk, you can take them to the library. You can say, "Honey, you can read any book in this library. What are you interested in?" And then they can just go off on their adventures whether they want to read about pirate ships or read about motors or read about epic fairy tales or Lord of the Rings. Whatever it is that they're interested in, they can now read. It's like the world is open to them. So we taught them to read, and now they're going to read to learn.

Janna Koch (27:09): Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think for a lot of kids that is not the process, right? You're learning so that you can read, but then you never really get past that, I think, in a lot of instances. You're still just reading, but you're not really learning, necessarily.

Aimee Eucce (27:31): Yeah. Yeah.

Janna Koch (27:31): I mean, how many times have you read a book and you were just not really paying attention and you're like, "I had to reread it"? And then sometimes for me, about the third time, I'm like, "Clearly, I should not be reading right now."

Aimee Eucce (27:41): I know when I'm tired because the dyslexic tendencies come out. And so when I find myself rereading the paragraph because my mind's what, I'm like, "Ah, Aimee, come on. Focus."

Janna Koch (27:52): Focus or just go to bed, Aimee. I mean, we're adults, right? We get to make these decisions for ourselves.

Aimee Eucce (27:58): This is true. This is true.

Janna Koch (28:00): Funny. I have to constantly remind myself I'm an adult.

Aimee Eucce (28:05): Maybe it's time for bed now.

Janna Koch (28:06): That's right.

Aimee Eucce (28:07): Maybe I'm just pushing it a little too hard tonight.

Janna Koch (28:08): Just because I can stay up till 10:00, doesn't mean that I should.

Aimee Eucce (28:12): That's very, very true.

Janna Koch (28:16): Well, as we're wrapping up, as a homeschool mom, yourself who's had success in this program and now you are seeing it in your own home, you're offering it to other families, your passion is very clear. The program's incredibly sound. What do you have for our audience as they are walking away from this? What would you like to leave them with?

Aimee Eucce (28:39): Well, I think that in homeschooling if you can instill a sense of wonder in your kids and just that attitude that they can do anything, that will take them so far in life. Because I mean, I think that it's... I can't even remember. I think it's 400 times a day a toddler is told no, for a good reason. Like I tell my kids no all the time. But if you think about it, the world, people in this world will just pretty much tell, "You can't do that. Oh, just get this kind of job. Oh, just do that. Oh, just do that." If we can instill this sense of wonder and learning and this excitement that they can do anything, they can be anything they put their minds to, just a little bit of that impossible factor, then we don't need to ground them in like, "Oh, this is the reality of life," but give them the, "I can do anything."

Aimee Eucce (29:30): And if they can come out of homeschool knowing that they can do and tackle anything in life, then really the heights that they can go, there are no limitations. They'll just soar, and it's amazing. And I say that because I try to do that with my kids and my mom did it with me. After being diagnosed and told I couldn't do this, I went on to graduate, I got my bachelor's degree. I have a master's degree. I'm now running a company that I learned to read with when I was five. I mean, if that's not the impossible factor, I don't know what is.

Janna Koch (30:09): Yeah. I love the that you used the word wonder, because I do feel like, especially over the last couple years with all that we have gone through as a country in the world and then as homeschoolers and the influx of people coming into homeschool, that we don't want to lose our sense of wonder, that we don't need to just do the bare minimum or do what everyone else is doing because that's what's expected of us. We get to have that wow factor. When people ask my kids, "Well, didn't you do that?" I kind of love when they're like, "No, but what we did do was..." And then they get to talk about their experiences of things that they have done that a traditional schooler didn't get to do. They're not always going to overlap. We don't always have to measure everything. It can just be learning for fun, it can just be enjoying being with our kids because they are small for such a short, short time.

Aimee Eucce (31:09): So good. I love that.

Janna Koch (31:11): Yeah. Well, Aimee, thank you so much for being with us today. We appreciate what you're contributing to those homeschooling families that are going to be tackling to teach their children to read, they need and use all the resources available to them. Again, it was something too scary in my mind, but I'm glad that we have programs like yours to promote so that people understand that it's not as hard as it seems and that it is completely doable with the right tools.

Announcer (31:47): Thank you for listening to this episode of Homeschool Your Way, a podcast by BookShark. Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening now so you'll be notified of future episodes. And if you have questions you'd like the hosts to answer or have any feedback about the podcast, please visit bookshark.com/podcast to leave your comments, or you can simply email podcast@bookshark.com.