Teaching a Child to Read

Hi, this is Sheri from OurLifeHomeschooling.com and I'm going to be sharing today how I teach our kids to read. In my last post I talked about how there are two things that need to happen every day with your child for them to become a successful reader. The first is to read to them a lot and that is one that takes a lot of time that you're going to be doing repetitively throughout the day in small chunks for them. The second thing is reading practice which should start at just about 15 minutes a day 10 to 15 minutes a day and of course as a child becomes more proficient that they're that's going to increase that time of them practicing reading is going to increase until eventually at some point they're no longer learning to read they are reading independently they're reading to learn. When I talked about reading to them a lot I gave a couple suggestions for the kinds of books that you can read to children. The first one I gave was nursery rhymes and I'm going to just share with you some of the nursery rhyme books that I've used with my kids. These are very simple books. These are actually hard to find anymore. I got these in an old bin and the reason years ago probably more than 15 years ago these are by Paragon Publishing. The reason I picked them was because they came with little musical tapes and so that tells you how old they are and the reason I like that was because kids love music so I played these even then I had a hard time finding a tape player because it was old then but I played these until I learned the songs and was able to sing them to my kids. Kids just love songs. If you can make motions with the songs that makes it even better so that's why I picked these. It was kind of I stumbled on them by accident and just stuck with them because I had learned little motions and songs for each of the kids and little children especially toddlers and preschoolers they feed on that and they will repeat them on their own. When they find time by themselves you'll see them repeating them. Another one that's great is we sing nursery rhymes and lullabies. There's also we sing bible story or I'm sorry bible songs. The thing I love about these is that it has music written in there if you don't know any music for some of the nursery rhymes. It also at some of the bottom of the pages has some motions that you can try. So those are what I use for nursery rhymes. I also suggested for reading to them that you read chapter books and for this you don't need a huge collection that you know they're always seeing something new. You can if you if that's your thing but I like just a small collection of 30 or 40 picture books that we read over and over again and they become our friends. Of course if over time if they kind of get tired of those then maybe you want to switch them out for another 30 or 40 but I just liked having a small collection that they almost seem like close companions experiences that we've had together. Another one I mentioned as far as reading aloud to them is chapter books and kids of all ages love chapter books. Ever since I can remember I've been reading a chapter book every day one or two chapters every day to our kids after lunch and when you do something regularly over a long period of time it's amazing the progress that you can make. The last thing that I mentioned as far as reading to them a lot is memory work. When kids memorize short poems, short passages of scripture this is a way to get words into their bank to solidify them and something for them to pull from. It's something that you'll hear them just like nursery rhymes you'll hear them start saying lines and phrases of these in random spots in your day. So memorizing can be a great way to feed into them to feed more words into them but I wanted to elaborate just a little bit more in this video about how I teach our kids to read specifically regarding reading practice. I think you might be surprised at how simple it is and how inexpensive it is. I have not spent a lot of money on my reading curriculum and it's almost I was intimidated to share it a little bit because there's not much to it. We just do the same thing every day consistently we make progress and if you have found a great reading curriculum that you love a great phonics program by all means stick with it don't try to do something that you know that someone else is doing. If you found something you like don't don't change but I just want to share with you what I've used and what has been very successful with our kids. Our kids are all proficient readers they love reading and so I thought I would share what we do. The first thing of course is teaching them their letters and their letter sounds and this you can do in lots of different ways. I wait with our kids until they are asking and mommy can I read I want to know or you start seeing things like they start pointing out letters and they want to know what the letters are and I feel like if you push it too early it's going to be a lot of work if your child isn't ready and if they're not interested but when they're ready when they're the ones that want to learn when they realize that you have a tool that they want for themselves and that they think they can get that's when you want to start teaching them to read. So the first place I start is with letter sounds I have some simple leapfrog flash cards there's lots of other great resources that you could find any type of simple flash cards you could use a book you can use Dr. Seuss has a book that goes through all the alphabet anything that you find that has simple alphabet letters for them to learn and to teach them their sounds. Another program we like to use is starfall.com I'll put that in the link below and so just something simple to teach them their letters. After they learn their letters to prepare them for the curriculum that I do use to teach them to read I have them start putting together simple words so I will start for example with and I'll put a line before it and I'll just slowly show them how to you know act and then put it together and then I'll say well what if we put a letter here you know and then they learn to read that so I'll erase it and we'll try well what if we change it to this then what would that say and you go through each letter but at bat and I often when I'm doing individual sounds we'll do dots and then when we're slurring it together do a line that just helps them to visualize it a little bit. I'll work on this we'll do this maybe once a day and this is part of our 10 to 15 minutes we'll do this for a couple days until they start getting pretty good at it I might change it up and do something like this we'll go through the sounds and then we will put this at the beginning and there you go and you know have them go through those sounds changing it up a little bit having them try different beginning letters this is helping them to recognize beginning letters once they have gotten to that I might take those words that we learned and just write them all out bat cat set and so on I make might make about 10 of them and put them in a list and instead of slowly doing it just have them go through and see if they can read a list of words when they get to this point and you might want to change it also you know sometimes I've done other vowels like et I mentioned ug you know ought you can try with other vowels but once they're just starting to put simple words together that's when I start our reading curriculum for our reading curriculum I use Bob books these that's not the first one here's the first one Bob books here is the first set beginning readers the Bob book set is a set of usually about 10 books 8 to 10 books in each set these are simple simple beginning readers so the first box and the first book in the first box is called Matt which you can see this is where I was starting with them putting letters together and it's very simple it starts with some beginning letter sounds all the letters that are going to be in this book and so I always review this with them go through it and go through the picture and talk about beginning sounds but then you can see it's very simple Matt Matt sat Sam Sam sat the next book after that is introduces the next vowel e so it's simple short e sounds and oh I'm sorry that's wrong that is not wrong it's not till the third book that it introduces a different vowel but I just wanted to show that to show that they introduce usually a new sound or a new concept each book or it's a review of what they've been doing and it slowly builds so we will work on the first Bob box all the books in there we go sequentially from the first to the last we do maybe one or two books a week and then the next week we'll start with another one I don't start with a new book until they are reading successfully and you can tell it's with confidence and we'll work through the first box until they finish we take it at their pace I don't push we keep it slow because I want this to be a pleasurable experience for them now sometimes you'll have kids that complain and oh this is so hard because it is hard for them when they're first learning and my feeling is anything that you work at for 10 or 15 minutes a day is not gonna hurt you in the long run and so you know there have been times where I said to the kids I know this is tough but you can do this for 10 minutes and then you'll get a break and as they move along they're going to feel more confidence when they can read more things so this is the first box in the Bob book set the second box is advancing beginning readers this also has 8 or 10 books in it the next one is word families so you'll have a few consonant blends endings a few sight words the next box is compound words so putting two words together to make more complex words and the last box is long vowels so there is something that I do in addition to the books to just reading the books I do about I want to say maybe five minutes of phonics practice before we actually read the books so five minutes of phonics practice and then maybe 10 minutes of reading through our Bob books and for our I know there are some fantastic phonics programs out there Explode the Code is one that comes to mind right away I know there's lots of great ones I started with this and I kept it really simple and I say that I hope that's encouraging to some people that it doesn't have to be something complex or you don't have to feel like you've got to get the perfect curriculum for your child to read I made up our own phonics phonics curriculum I guess you could say as we came to a new Bob book I would look through the book before we started it and I would write down the new beginning sounds maybe those were just a new vowel maybe it was putting two letters together like ph to make the sound or th to make the sound I would write that down in here and then I would write one or two words below it so in the beginning of this book I started with about two pages of sight words and every time you come to a sight word for example a sight word is a word that you can't spell or you can't sound out very easily so the letter uh you know when a kid comes to it they're gonna immediately say a or a but they need to understand this is a sight word it does not follow the rules and when you see that word you say uh another word would be the that doesn't follow the rules when you see that word you are you know you go through that this word says the and I make a list of all the sight words that don't follow the rule they are on the first page of this book and they're what we look at first after that we will look for example at a page like this I made let's see if I can yep there we go I made this page I made all the r blend sounds this is just as we came to them so I didn't create this beforehand I just looked in the book the next book we were reading and if we came to a sound once we started the ar sounds I would write ar I wrote three ar words under it and so before reading that day our book we would look at the sight words we would go over the sounds in that book and just read those three words and just remember when you come to a word that has ar in it it makes the sound are like car bar far um here's another example of a page that we made with ow and ou sounds um so this is very simple again when we sat down for our 15 minutes we did about five minutes of reviewing the sight words and reviewing the new sounds that were in our book and then we would get out the book we would read one book maybe two books if uh they were up for that and if they were ready for that kind of progress uh one rule that I did work on with them when we came to long vowels because long vowels is a kind of a big jump for kids they're going from saying the sounds of vowels to saying their names a e i o u so uh for this I taught them a game I taught them the five vowels a e i o u and sometimes y and I reminded them of their sounds and we would play a consonant game and I told them every other letter other than these letters is a consonant so they would try to think of one for example t and then it would be my turn and I would try to think of one c and then it would be their turn s and so on so this is uh just a simple game that I taught them to learn the difference between a vowel and a consonant and to teach them that vowels have sounds and they have names two other rules that I taught them with learning their long vowel words was whenever you see two vowels together um the first vowel says its name and the second vowel is quiet so for example if you see o and a in a word together the first vowel says its name I show that sign for name I show this sign for sound o and a the first vowel says its name the second one is silent so this would say oh and then I always give them an example like boat the second um rule that I taught them was the pattern v c e which is vowel consonant silent e so an example of this might be eight vowel consonant silent e this is not necessarily a rule but a pattern that they're going to see in a lot of words um aim for example as in came vowel consonant silent e and they begin to recognize this pattern and it can help them to identify when they would say the long sound of the vowel or the short sound so when my kids get to the end of the last box the fifth box usually if they have not already they are starting to read picture books on their own so that's where the bob books take you they take you to when you are about ready to read picture books and even some books that maybe have less pictures for example um little bear is often a book that I will give them after they finish their bob box I'll give them stories like little bear another great one is frog and toad um I don't seem to have a copy of that here any of the Francis books when they finish they're ready to read Francis books you can see these books have a lot more words and fewer pictures another great one is Nate the great Amelia Bedelia these are just some of the ones that I will give my kids to work on after they finish this is where they will be after they finish the last bob box and after that they pretty much start slowly progressing to reading books more picture books and eventually they're ready for simple chapter books so those are just a few things that I taught my kids along with the bob books sometimes if they got frustrated and I could tell that it was really taking them a while to get through a book I would help them out and we would do every other page so they would read a page and I would read a page and that seemed to be enough of a crutch for them to give them the motivation to finish that book so that's my simple way of how I teach our kids to read like I told you it's not impressive it was inexpensive and it was very simple so if you found something great by all means stick with that and go through what is working for you but if you're looking for something simple and easy and just using some of the things you have this is a great way to start I hope that's helpful for the people who need it