Did you learn phonics in school?

It was taught in my first grade class in the early 1970s.

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

Sesame Street taught me phonics.

I don't remember ever hearing the word "phonics" except in commercials for Hooked on Phonics

That said, the concept of phonics was absolutely part of how I learned to read, even though they never outright told us that that was what we were learning.

I remember one time thinking about how my grandpa didn't learn this and other related skills as a kid the same way I did in school and so we understand our same language a totally different way, where I saw parts of words, he just saw a whole word.

Yes, from early 70s onward.

I just had the phonics monkey

Yes, my elementary school explicitly used it.

I didn’t, for me it was “Ai, Bee, See, Dee, Eee, Eff, Jee” (except in my local language Danish). My children all learnt phonics in their U.K. school and it’s taught them to read 5x faster I’d say).

Long after I learned to read. At which point it was just confusing since so many words can't be 'sounded out'.

I learned to read alongside learning to speak, learned it like a language, not like a code, I didn't really sound things out consciously, it went in the other direction, I recognized words. So by 3 years I could read quite well, and did come by that path to an understanding that the individual letters had sounds.

Like if you've ever seen a little kid learning to write, they start with just scribbles then lines of scribbles then clumps of "letters" then actual words with letters. That is sort of the process I had - books held stories, then I saw there was writing, then my mom read the stories while pointing to the words, then I pretended I could read by memorizing the book, but then just jumped to being able to read. Anything. Like first book was "bears on wheels" but second book was Grendel, and I could read the newspaper, literally think I could understand written language more than spoken.

So anyway - yes was taught phonics but not taught to read with phonics.

This comment section is reminding me its not normal for me to have maybe a dozen memories from under age 13. I have never even heard of phonics i just know i can read. Idk how i learned to. When i read i just like do it. Its the same as listening it just happens.

Nah, it was mostly rote. But, I was reading pretty early, and my family did use a looser form of phonics with all of us. When it was a read-along, they'd point out words that didn't fit normal phonic rules, and explain a little. Read-alongs were super frequent for us. Daily, for most of my childhood, though I kinda "graduated" into doing the reading somewhere around 3rd grade for the second wave of cousins on one side of the family.

My mom's family runs high to dedicated readers, so it was always a thing where someone was reading something out loud to share a passage or whatever, even when it wasn't one of the adults reading to the kids as a group. And all our parents were super into reading to us individually too.

In kindergarten, it was straight into it, no phonics involved at all. But it was still mostly group based reading. First grade, it was individual work, with vocabulary, reading, and writing as parts of the language arts section of class. No phonics, and really no sounding things out at all. My first grade teacher was sweet as all get out, but did not play around with lessons.

Nope. Never even heard of it until recently, in the context of kids leaving school unable to read.