How I Teach Reading

Homeschooled or not when your child gets to age five reading becomes very important to mamas.  If you are homeschooling the burden falls completely on you as the teacher to teach your child to read.  A child in public school gets lots of support from teachers, but there is still an element that has to come from home.  I love learning new techniques for teaching your child to read.  Of course it's going to be different with every child, I'm sure Ann Elizabeth will need different strategies because let's be honest number two doesn't get as much one on one time, or reading time.  Anyway for what it's worth here are the things I did to teach Sterling to read.

1. Taught the letter sounds not the alphabet.
Way back when he started showing interest in letters, I decided what is the point, really, in teaching the letter names?  Eventually they will pick up on that, but does knowing letter names really help with literacy?  I decided that letter names weren't necessary so when we would look at letters I always called them by their letter sound.  Soon he had it down and we started playing games naming words that started with those letters.

2. Practiced rhyming words.
After Sterling was really good at grouping words by beginning sounds, we started coming up with rhyming words.  I taught him to blend three letter words using rhyming words.  I used this paint swatch idea I found on pinterest
 

not my pic

We practiced blending just two sounds on the big card, then he just had to put the beginning sound with it.  I think this helped him greatly. As he progressed I added harder endings like ones with long vowel sounds or other diphthongs.

3.  Preschool Prep for sight words
We didn't know about these videos until after we had already learned sounds. Sterling loves TV, way to much in fact.  But I've learned that he really learns well from educational videos, so, why fight it.  We watched Preschool Prep and soon he had the sight words from the videos down. He would even tell me what video the words were from (to have half that memory!)

4. We read chapter books aloud at an early age.
I think I started reading chapter books aloud to him at about three.  (I really need to start this with Ann Elizabeth). At four we started letting him stay up a little bit later to listen to a chapter. So reading became a reward for him.

4.  Found easy readers to practice
There's nothing like actually doing something to practice, so we started on Dr. Seuss.  We went to the library and checked out easy leveled readers.  We tried to read everyday, but you know how that goes.  Life gets in the way.  Sterling quickly got to where he dreaded reading, it became a chore for him.  I hated it because he is really a good reader.

5. Let him read what he wanted
It went against everything in my teacher training to let him do this because what he wanted to read were chapter books.  Hard chapter books, I didn't want him to get frustrated and hate reading even more.  I tried checking out comic books (which it's hard to find ones that are appropriate by the way) and even that he wasn't really into reading.  I had to make him pick them up, and he wanted to be done in a few minutes.  So I decided to let him try; I decided it wasn't going to get worse.  We started with Magic Tree House books.  The vocabulary isn't super difficult.  He would read some at night and then I would read the rest of the chapter.  It took a lot of patience because he needed lots of help. But as he is a memorizer. Soon, he was remembering the words that we had sounded out.  We had worked just a little on the diphthongs and blends and such, but when actually reading tough words he practiced them a lot and soon was reading more and more without help.  In the beginning I didn't try to make him read every word.  I would help him sound it out quickly if he came to a word that was hard.  But soon I would have to help less and less.  This little five year old has been sitting beside me night after night reading Winnie-the-Pooh, which according to Accelerated Reader is a 5.9 reading level.  Which is why I hate when schools push AR.  He wouldn't be allowed to struggle through this book even if he wanted to at some schools because it isn't "on his level."  And it's not.  By no means is he reading on the level of an average sixth-grader, but with a little help here and there he can read two pages a night (about 20 mins).