It’s so funny, but it’s taken me 3 children to really feel like I know how to teach a child to read. It’s really not that hard, but I didn’t quite do it right the first two times.
Child #1 I overtaught. I read to her for hours a day, since she was my first for a while. And when I taught her to read, I used a boxed program. Well, I overtaught her. I didn’t realize this until it was summertime and her 8 yo cousin showed her some books and her reading took off. At that point, I had only covered long vowel sounds with her. I was planning on doing blends next. We never did get to those blends.
Child #2 I undertaught. I made the assumption that all I had to do was teach him the same way I taught her. It didn’t work. I should have tried Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with him, because the traditional route did not work well with him. So, eventually, his reading finally took off when he started reading the bible with his father at night.
Child #3 is doing great. I started with 100 Easy Lessons up to about lesson 70. At that we switched to The Original Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. That was okay, but way too detailed and broken down for me. So I went through my materials and found some beginning readers that I really liked. They were by Christian Liberty Press. We went through all 4 of those books, and his reading was great. We just read through them, one page at a time.
After that, I came across the Webster’s speller, and we began covering the syllables. From there his confidence has just grown leaps and bounds. He is now working on decoding 2 syllable words. And we are just simply reading through the tables. After 2 syllable words, then 3.
He is having so much fun reading. He feels like a big kid. He reads everyday for fun. And he is even reading to his 3 yo little brother.
It was so cute yesterday when I caught the two of them reading. The 5 year old (6 next week) reads the page and the 3 year old narrates it back to him. It was so encouraging to see them practicing, on their own, what I have been trying to do with them for the past few months.
I can’t say I am very consistent. In fact, I can only handle focusing on one subject intensely at a time. So since January, the intense focus for my 5 year old has been reading. Before that it was manuscript writing. This summer the whole family will be focusing on Spanish. But while we have one area of intense focus, we do keep plodding along in math and the other subjects, just not with the same intensity. They’re scheduled and we do it. And not every child has the same intense focus.
For my 10 yo daughter, it’s outlining. For my 9 yo son, it’s reading. And for my 5 yo it’s reading as well. Spanish for everyone during the summer and in the fall, it will all switch again. Probably Latin for the older two. Math for the younger tw
