[dmboyd]

Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.

To bridge that, I actually built a font that keeps those phonics-aligned features and allowed us to use stories from things like Project Gutenberg. It’s based on the open-source TeX Gyre Schola, ( kind of like what is used in the Spot books) with OpenType features that auto-connect common digraphs (like “th”, “sh”, “ch”)— but in a way that can gradually phase out. Just put it up on GitHub if you're curious: Reading Guide Font. Open for any feedback or criticism!

https://github.com/dmboyd/Reading-Guide

[mwachs]

Man, I thought I was putting in work by doing the lessons from the book (which is INCREDIBLE) with my 1st grader…way to go above and beyond!

This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!

[yorwba]

In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?

[dmboyd]

Thanks for that. Working on automating that but currently relies on macrons being typed manually.

[pajko]

Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.

trouble / about: the 'u' should be marked, at least for 'trouble' to make it silent (or probably in both cases but differently, not sure about other similar words). But then there's 'o' in lemonade which is different from 'o' in 'trouble'. Also 'oo' in 'loot' seems strange (should be ⊚⊚ with the recommendation above). Or am I misunderstanding something in the point of the markings? Anyway, it hurts my eyes.

[dmboyd]

I’m working on a workflow to automating font weight and sizing to cover silent letters and prosody which should cover a bit of that. One of the key aspects though as a transitional learning tool is to teach children the diversity of sounds. So it’s intentional to not have a 1:1 mapping between phonemes and graphemes.