Simple Steps for Teaching Reading That Work
Are you overwhelmed at the thought of teaching your child to read? Here are simple steps for teaching reading that actually work! This is the way I have successfully taught eight of our ten kids to read.
In my last post, TEACH A CHILD TO READ WITH TWO HABITS, I wrote about the two necessary habits that should happen every day with your child for them to become a successful reader.
- You should read to your child frequently and daily.
- Your child should practice reading 15 minutes daily using a phonics-based reading program..
In my last post, I elaborated on the first point explaining what types of books you should be reading to kids (nursery rhymes, picture books, chapter books) and how to use them. In this post, I will focus on the second part of learning to read: DAILY READING PRACTICE.
Video: Simple Steps for Teaching Reading That Actually Work
Practicing Reading
Young children who are beginning to read for the very first time should spend at least 15 minutes a day practicing reading. A fifteen-minute reading lesson is enough time to challenge them, but not exhaust them. Furthermore, this length of time should slowly increase as they improve in reading level.
I have chosen a plain, inexpensive approach to teaching my kids to read. We use Bob Books You can read more about how we use them along with my handy phonics guide in this post.
The Companion Beginner Guide to Teaching Reading With Bob Books
There are a plethora of flashier, more trendy reading curricula available, but instead, I picked something simple and I think this has made all the difference!
Beware:
You don’t have to find the BEST reading curriculum out there!
You can use a very simple, plain reading program. It doesn’t matter so much WHAT you choose. It matters that you start and consistently progress every day.
You can just pick something and start. In fact, that’s what I suggest!
Here are the steps I have used to teach our kids to read.
Step 1: Don’t start until they are ready!!
If you are already reading to your child frequently from an early age as part of your daily routine, they naturally acquire pleasure for a good story. The building blocks that make good readers begin with you the parent.
“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” -Emily Buchwald
When they are alone at play, you might see them with an open book pretending to read. They might start asking about letters or pointing to words and asking about them. They may try drawing letters. Any of these pre-reading skills are signs that your child is ready to read.
One of the most important things is that you remember your child’s individual needs. Just as children develop differently, children learn to read at different ages and stages.
Step 2: Learn letter sounds.
The first step of phonics instruction is to start teaching your child the names and individual sounds of each letter of the alphabet. Using flash cards to teach different sounds is a great starting point too . Flash cards are one of my favorite tools for teaching letter recognition because the kids like the competition of seeing how many they can recognize.
You can use Alphabet books. Dr. Seuss’s ABC Book is a book we have used to teach letters. Also, starfall.com is a great way to expose kids phonics patterns, word families, common words, cvc words, basic sentence structure, etc. in a way that is fun. The important thing is that they are seeing capital and small letters together to recognize the difference between both.
Step 3: Put sounds together.
I like to start with a whiteboard and an exercise like this. Write an easy three-letter word and change out the first letter by erasing it and writing a new one in to see if they can read it as you change the beginning letter. Point to each letter and say the sound, then slide from left to right as you slur the sounds together to make simple words.
_AT
RAT
CAT
MAT
SAT
When they can combine letters in the word every time you replace the first letter with a new one, try making a list of about ten _AT words and having them read a list.
After trying _AT, you can experiment with other endings, especially introducing words with other vowel sounds in them: _EN, _IN, _OG, _UT
When children master the foundational skill of blending sounds together, they are ready to begin reading.
Step 4: Begin your reading curriculum.
For our Reading Curriculum, we have chosen Bob Books. Bob Books are a five box set with each box containing about 8 beginning reader books.
Our 15 minute reading practice is two-fold in this order.
First
Phonics practice (5 minutes). I made a simple phonics practice book to go along with our Bob Books. I made it over time by adding a few words daily as we came to them. It was effortless. Every day that we started a new Bob book, I looked ahead at any new sight words or new sounds in that book and wrote them down in a notebook, adding to it as we moved along to each new book. I did this to introduce the new sounds and words before we read them and to review them after we read them.
The first page is a running list of sight words and high-frequency words. The following pages are lists of sounds with 2-3 sample words below them.
Below is the original notebook I made for my kids.
I have used this successfully to teach eight of our ten kids to read. Below is the current printed notebook you can find on the blog. For more pictures, take a look at the Companion Beginner Guide to Teaching Bob Books.
Second
Reading one or two Bob books (10 minutes). Although an introduction and review of phonics will build a strong foundation, more time should be spent actually reading the books. Reading real books is the fun part that they have been waiting for!
Consistent work in this fifteen-minutes a day practice will produce successful readers! (Again, do not neglect the very important step from my last post which is reading to them frequently as part of your daily routine.)
If you have some struggling readers, my question would be this. How often are you reading to them (or using audiobooks) throughout the day as part of your routine?
Common reading challenges are often solved when you scale waaaay back on the reading instruction and increase your read-aloud time. If you are reading to them and practicing reading every day, your child will gain confidence and develop strong reading skills over time.
Step #5 Reading Progression
Beginning readers> picture books> chapter books.
When we finish our 5 Bob Books boxes, our budding reader is ready to move to more challenging texts and to read “real” books. Here are some books I have given to our kids to help them move from picture books to chapter books.
Picture books are very concrete for a child. They have fewer words and more pictures. Chapter books, because they have more words and fewer pictures, challenge a child because they require him to use his imagination.
Wherever you are on your reading journey with your child, don’t be discouraged! Teaching kids to read takes time and lots of practice, but it will come if you let it happen naturally.
Parents get frustrated teaching younger students to read when they feel pressured into thinking that reading should happen by a certain age or at a certain pace.
Keep reading aloud to them and having them practice reading every day.
The point of reading practice is PROGRESSION. Ignore what everyone else says or makes you feel. Ask yourself, “Is my child moving forward?” Do not make the mistake of putting expectations on a child that will only discourage him!
Have more questions about teaching a child to read? Id’ love to hear them!
RESOURCES AND ENCOURAGEMENT
Looking for more resources for teaching reading? Check out my most popular posts!
Creating a Literate Environment in Your Home
When Should I Start Teaching My Child To Read?
Teach A Child To Read With Two Important Habits
Creating Family Memories by Reading Together: Interview With Josie
Also find inspiration for your homeschool by checking out my gallery of MOM INTERVIEWS!
Where do you get your audio books and what devices do you use for the kiddos?
We have bought a small collection of audio books on Amazon, but we take advantage of inter-library loan as well! I purchased all of the audio Little House series read by Cherry Jones. She is excellent! Also, we have most of the audio Rush Revere series because they are chock full of American history. We are not audible members yet, but I’m considering it because of the fantastic selection of audio books.
As far as devices, we try to be strategic about screens with the kids during the school day, for the simple reason that they can become a HUGE distraction. I ask them to finish all their (paper and pencil) school work first and save their online school work for last. They use laptops. We use Veritas self-paced history courses (love them!), Rosetta Stone for foreign language, and seterra.com for geography. Otherwise, most of their school work is offline.
These posts are encouraging me SO much! Thank you for sharing. Do they use CD players to listen to audio books or Kindle or? Thank you!
I am so glad to hear! We use a CD player. Over a years I have accumulated a nice collection of some of our favorites. I’ve also used the library audio. On occasion I have used Kindle for books, especially books that are hard to find, out of print, or expensive, but for audio, so far, we have used mostly CD’s.