I have developed a system in our home that has a pretty simple outline. If you are a blogging mom who has developed a system in your home, please feel free to blog about it and then post a comment and/or link to your blog in the comment section below. :-)
Without Further Adieu,
this is how we taught our children to read.
1. At around 2 years of age we bought the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD.
By the time the kids had watched this DVD for a few weeks, they knew their letters and sounds. I was sick of the movie and the song, but they soaked it up like a sponge. :-)
but we carried the lessons into daily life by reading to them and pointing to letters in signs on buildings..like at the bank or grocery store...."What's that letter? What sound does it make?" If they forgot a few letters they quickly remembered them again when we popped the video back into the DVD player at around 3 1/2 years of age.
Brisan remembered all of his letters and sounds again in a jiffy and I could tell that he felt the nostalgia as he recognized the movie. LOL
True! "MOM I remember that!"
2. At about 3 1/2 years of age we also introduced them to the Starfall website. It is Free, wonderful, keeps them entertained and a fun way to learn.
3. At around 4 1/2 we began using the Dolch Flash cards. I used to make them by printing them from this Free site, pasting the pages to construction paper and then cutting them out to make the cards. They were flimsy so I broke down and bought them from Super Duper Publications. That was before I bought my handy-dandy Laminating Machine! Now I'm a laminating queen! I laminate everything from letters to placemats to math flash cards! :o)
4. As they got more comfortable with letter sounds, I began reading them the Bob Books.
I found them at our local library and then found them, for a steal, at Costco so I bought the whole set. They are fun early readers for kids that help them take off on their reading adventure.The Dolch Sight Words Flashcards
were a must for us to help them have a nice, firm basis for reading. After they began sounding out words, the process basically took on a life of it's own. All we had to do was be sure to have enough early reader books
laying around, for the kids to grab, as they started to enjoy the freedom of reading independently. That's about it. That's how we taught our kids to read! :-) How did you do it?
5 COMMENTS:
Our son is learning disabled and teaching reading was (and continues at age 13) to be very challenging.
We did all of the "right things" -- reading to him, exposing him to lots of great literature, letter and word magnets on the fridge and the front door, modeling reading enjoyment, reading signs and boxes, educational tv shows, sites like Starfall, journaling and blogging together, etc. But those things did not teach him to read.
Our best resources to date have been picturemereading.com for dolch words, lots of phonemic awareness building exercises from "The Sources for Dyslexia and Dysgraphia" and our psychologist, "All About Spelling" (which we modified and go through very slowly), hi-lo readers from Chestnut Publishing, and reading coaching methods from "Reading Rescue 1-2-3" and Vera Goodman's "Simply Read".
We still read lots of stuff out loud for our son, get books on disk, etc. We focus as much as possible on the joy of reading and what fun we get out of books, because I don't ever want him to give up on reading because it is too hard. It's going to take more years before he is fluent at a reading level that will get him through life (my goal is a grade 8 reading level), and I don't want him to get too frustrated and stop. I want him to keep enjoying great literature through all sorts of media.
Hey Shelly,
Sorry to leave an off-topic comment, but I couldn't find any contact info for you on the blog, and wanted to ask about a guest post. Please drop me an e-mail!
Thanks,
Lindsey
Hi Lindsay, :o)
You can email me at
shelly@facebook.com
I really really really want a laminator!
A friend loaned us her copy of Teach Your Kids to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, but my daughter never got into it. We have owned the LeapFrog DVD for quite a while. It wasn't until recently that our daughter even showed an interest in reading. We got on the Starfall website and it all just started clicking with her. She is loving it. We are a family of word game players, so she has begun playing along with us and this has helped boost her confidence.
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