I've tried and failed in the past. (With my older guys) How do I start teaching my little guy to read?? He wants to read. He asked for (and got) a "kindle" for his birthday. (Actually a V-tech reader but still.) He sits and tries to read it and books. He's asking me letters and words. I think he is ready for some basic reading lessons. Do I start with the ABC's?? I think I have hooked on phonics in the garage. I don't have a ton of time a day to give him lessons. If he could learn to read before Kindergarten (at least some) Dh would be OK with him being HS but if not, he'll be sent to the local PS.
If you've "tried and failed" in the past, it was probably because they weren't ready yet. I'm a firm believer that there's a time frame in which a child learns to read. It's different for each kid. If you try to push it too early, you've got a battle on your hands. Personally, I think that's why public schools fail miserably. Some kids aren't "there" until an older age; by then, they've been so "bad" at it, that they think they're stupid and have learned to "hate" reading and never become good readers. You don't need a "ton of time". What you DO need is patience and consistency. Yes, teach him his letters first. Many ways of doing this. You can make flash cards. You can give him the responsibility of crossing words off your shopping lists. "OK, here's the bananas. Cross off the bananas; that's the word that starts with the B!" Play "I Spy" when out driving. "I see a word with two P's in it (pointing at the PEPSI truck)!" Phillip loved making Letter Books. Pick a letter. Then go to your Word program and find all the clip art that starts with B (boy, bat, bird, baby....) and print them out. Take some paper, cut them in half, and fold each piece in half. Staple them together in the middle to make a book. Glue one picture on each page (though it works better to glue BEFORE stapling, or you're trying to prevent pages from sticking together). Write the word (he can copy the word, or you write it and he traces, or you can write it yourself, depending on the kid, but make the initial letter BIG!). Title it Johnny's "B" Book, and he will "read" it Daddy when he comes home. Be sure to add a picture of family members when appropriate! We also do this with rhyme families: an ..."AT" Book, an ..."OCK" Book, etc. READ, READ, and READ to him! Kindergarten teachers say that reading to preschoolers is the number one measure of success in teaching children to read!
thanks for asking the question - martablack. i'm also seeking for ways to teach my youngest girl 5yo, too. i like all your suggestions, jackie. thank you! good health and happiness.
I agree with Jackie. Talk about letters, read constantly. I attached 6 inch uppercase letters to our walls with clear contact paper...in random places. I would say, "Put this truck beside the 's' " when we were playing, picking up, etc. (I would recommend doing both upper and lower with your son...my dd was only 2) We learned mostly through talking about signs while driving in the car. DR. SEUSS is a genius! Hop on Pop is priceless! Have fun! When he can ientify his letters and has some basic phonics behind him, I highly recommend "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" Have fun!
As mom to one of those kids who wasn't ready (and was taught incorrectly) so concluded she was stupid... Definitely start with the letters and letter sounds. Absolutely make a game of it. Understand first and foremost, though, that failing to teach your older two means ZERO. Honestly! Before ds started K, I decided to finally teach him his alphabet lol. We had played letter games but it was my first try at making a REAL effort. And wow, it was a total failure! After a month I called it quits because I could see that I was confusing him instead of helping. With dd, I had to start almost from scratch, AND I have to remediate bad habits. Our lessons are as much about confidence building as they are about reading, so we walk along at a steady pace. And she's getting it! For us, for the more formal lessons, I started with about 10 minutes a day. I gave us a letter of the day, and that was the new sound we talked about. I made a picture of the letter, complete with a drawing to started with the sound, and stuck it up on the wall. And every day we would go through each letter on the wall first- reviewing what she knew. "E says /e/ like elephant and /E/ like eagle..." in a chant. When we started actually reading, dd had to learn to read from left to right (yes, she really did) and we started with simple flashcards of basic CVC words. Be aware that it takes a mental leap to go from /c/--/a/--/t/ to "cat". When dd was ready, I printed off some books at the progressive phonics website, and she reads those to me along with storybooks. I believe in daily short lessons because that's what dd can handle, but ymmv. I love the phonics lessons in the back of 'Why Johnny Can't Read', but I'm sure any really good phonics lessons with limited sight words will work. For ds, who reads well but I worry about long term, we are starting Don Potter's blend phonics this fall. Some people believe in sight words, but I don't AT ALL. That is primarily what our local ps teaches, and I've seen the effects on my dd, my ds, my dh (who can't spell his way out of a wet paper bag) and countless other kids and grownups who either struggle even to learn, or grow up unable to spell and hating to read. That's just mho, though.
SOME sight words are essential, because there are words that don't follow phonic rules and they can't be sounded out. Eventually you will want her to recognize words as a whole, CAT, rather than sounding it out. YOU don't sound out each and every word you read, but I bet you fall back to sounding out skills when you come upon a strange word you've never seen before! But teaching to read based on sight words, rather than phonics (and other clues such as context) is DISASTEROUS!!! And you are SO RIGHT in saying that building confidence was much more important than teaching reading!
No Jackie, I don't but that is because I have read that word a zillion times so don't have to I agree to disagree on sightwords
I agree with you. I have taught three of my children to read prior to age 3. I taught phonics first, and when we came to sight words which didn't seem to follow the rules, we simply sounded them out, and then I told the child how it is actually said. For instance, "I taught them to sound out "said" as "s-a-i-d", and then told them that whenever they came to that word they should simply say, "said". It works. The word "cat" follows the rules perfectly, there is no reason to do anything other than sound it out. It doesn't take long before the children are quickly saying "cat", rather than sounding it out.
We can agree to disagree. But my point is that YOU read NOW by sight word. You see the word as a whole, and read it as a whole. While I agree whole-heartedly with teaching phonics, at some point a person moves beyond that to sight words. This is usually done without them even realizing it. I DO NOT AT ALL believe in teaching children to read simply by sight words, however!!!
All three of my kids used www.starfall.com to learn to read. Free. Online, etc. For my middle and my youngest, I was getting ready to formally teach them to read, and to follow the program (they'd just been "playing" on the site), and they both were already reading by that point. I do reinforce phonics based rules, but all three of my kids read above grade level and I SWEAR it's due to the start they had with Starfall. They have a pre-reading section which is just letters. Then it moves into a "learning to read" section, and then "I'm reading" and then even more difficult reading level. All three of my kids were ready for the simple chapter books after that. My youngest is about to start American Girl chapter books! Also, I love the Leap Frog videos. (reading ones, not the math ones!)
Ok, I'm no... reading expert here, but here is a weird difference between my son (and I've heard so from and about other people who learned to read with sight words) and myself: I 'hear' the word in my head when I see it. Even for cat. My ds does not, and has difficulty understanding what I mean when I say I 'hear' it. He sees it as a picture, so the entire process is completely different. Speculating, I believe this is also the reason he has difficulty running the 'movie' of what he is reading in his head. It's sort of like trying to watch 2 movies at the same time- one of the words, and one of the images. I agree with you that you could technically call my reading of the word cat sight reading, but the process and results are so entirely different as to be a different entity altogether, so I'm not even comfortable calling it that. I use my mental ears in conjunction with my eyes. I don't know if that makes sense... as I said, I'm no expert here.
Are you "hearing" it as a whole? For example, when you hear the word CAT, I assume you're hearing all three sounds blended together, not three seperate sounds. You look at the word as ONE UNIT, not as its seperate parts. That's why I say you read (and consequently hear) the"whole word". But again, it is NOT the way to TEACH reading! You cannot understand putting the whole without understanding the parts that go into making that whole! That's really interesting, though. You and your son are definately wired differently. My dh's problem is accepting that not everyone is wired like him. Because HE learns that way, anyone who DOESN'T is lazy :roll:.
I agree with Jackie about the sight words. It's absolutely not the way to teach a child to read, but we all eventually sight read (except words with which we're unfamiliar; hence the dislike of learning by sight). Besides, sight-word learning is far more tedious than phonetic learning. There are only 26 letters to memorize (with their sound variations). If you teach a child to read by sight, the child must memorize every single word he will ever read. I'll take phonetics for $500, Alex.
I also agree with Jackie and would like to add that I think learning to read through sight words also leads to poorer spelling in the long-run. There was a big movement in TN about 15 years or so ago where they threw out phonics, and I don't know if it is coincidence or not, but ALL of my nieces and nephews between the ages of 16 and 22 are now poor spellers.
Unless you have kids like mine. The whole was easier than the parts. I taught reading by having them read. They already knew most of their letter sounds or were reading basic words before I starting teaching anything though. I did phonics too, but those skills lagged behind. If they couldn't read the word I would have them break it into parts to figure it out.
Thanks for all the advice. I let him watch the "A" video on Starfall a couple of time. We talked about learning all the letters. He's back to playing now and singing "A", "A", "A" "apple". I need to go buy ink, so he can work on the worksheets while his brothers HS. I also ordered 100 easy lessons. It seems like he wants to read. (If it doesn't work no big deal.) And his little brother showed zero interest and I'm OK with that.
