> AF>    Sure.  Sugar.  Comb.  Tomb -vs- bomb.  A as in As, or A as in Army.
  >    Which witch.  There, their.
 > I think we are in agreement here. Stay tuned for
 > further discussion.
At least two phonics programs have not forgotten these types of problems with 
the English/American language: Slingerland and A Beka. (There are lots of 
similarities between the two. A teacher colleague when I taught in Alaska 
used Slingerland in her room, while I was modifying A Beka slightly for use 
in a public school classroom. Neither of us knew the others' phonics system, 
yet when we compared notes, we were very surprised that the approach was 
somewhat similar.)
A Beka uses phonics charts. For some kids, skill and drill is one way to use 
these. I did that, made the phonics rules into games, and did anything else I 
oculd do to help them remember the rules. We played "find the rules" in 
words, etc. The kids became great word readers. Then we applied those in 
reading class and helped them learn to turn those words into meaning 
(comprehension). We did literature, too....mostly as read-aloud. Oops, I 
digress.
A Beka's "rules" include all of those above. On one of the later charts, kids 
learn "o-m-b says omb in comb". Another chart has "a says 'uh' in asleep". 
"t-c-h, 'ch' in patch." "a-r, ar in stars". "o-m-b, oom in tomb". etc. Then, 
later, in those games, they learn to figure out what the word says by taking 
those "rules" and applying them to a word. They learn to try out each word 
with a rule, and using a rule that sounds different if the first one didn't 
turn out correctly. Then there are just a few words left that have to be 
taught by look-say or sight method.
Gotta run...gotta go to work!
                                 -donna
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