Where the science of reading ends and the art begins

Phonics is great BUT that doesn't mean that kids have to be explicitly taught every little inflection of spoken English.

Written English words do not capture the exact pronunciation of spoken English words, and we would be better off treating them as "hints" rather than trying to impose unnecessary precision on early readers.

Some parts of spoken English aren't even captured in the written form at all, e.g: which syllable is stressed. How do you know that monkey and giraffe are MONkey and girAFFE and not monKEY and GIRaffe?

The goal of phonics is to get you close enough that your existing spoken vocabulary resolves the ambiguity.

Julie Orton (of Orton-Gillingham) mentions this in regard to plural -s: "Pupils seem naturally to use the unvoiced sound of /s/ after an unvoiced consonant and /z/ after voiced sounds - bets and beds"

The /t/ in the words stop and top are actually pronounced differently (the /t/ in top has a puff of air), but we don't write them differently, because the written hint is close enough.

The /a/ in can is different from the /a/ in cat, but it's not necessary to teach that rule either.

The /ng/ sound is frequently taught as a digraph (and we teach it that way in Mentava), but many kids find it just as effective to sound out the /n/ and /g/ separately.

And in fact, we chose not to teach /nk/ (as in ink) as its own sound (despite the nasalization of the /n/) because it's just not necessary to overwhelm kids with that level of precision.

These tiny judgement calls are where the science of reading ends and the art begins.