Are you looking for teaching reading resources and ideas? Do you need help with figuring out the steps in teaching reading to your child? Or, are you trying to determine what's the best way to teach a child to read? You've come to the right place! Here, we'll share with you some of our teaching reading ideas; explain our approaches and steps to teach a child to read; and share some resources and programs that are very simple, but extremely effective at teaching young children to read. Before we get into that, let me introduce you to a little girl named Raine.
Raine is our first child. We taught her to read at 2 years and 11 months old. By reading, we mean real reading as in being able to effectively decode printed text and comprehend its meaning - absolutely no memorization of words. At 4 years 2 months old, she had a reading age of 9 years old (grade 3). Find that hard to believe? Please take 2 minutes to watch the video below of some reading clips taken when she was 3 years 4 months old.
Pretty impressive accomplishment for a 3 year old. Some might think there must be some "trickery" involved, and others might think that she is a very bright kid that's able to read very early. However, there are no "tricks" or "gimmicks" involved, and if she grows up to be a very smart individual, I would argue that learning to read at a very young age had something to do with it! We have more reading videos posted here, with success stories from other parents who were also able to teach their young children to read. How are we able to teach a 2 year old to read? We use a very simple reading program we devised ourselves.
Our Lesson Plan to Teach Reading - 5 Steps in Teaching Reading
A few things should be very obvious when trying to teach a young child how to read. 1) The teaching reading lesson plans must be short, as small children have very short attention spans; 2) the lessons plans cannot be too complicated or involve too much learning of rules; and 3) the lesson plans must follow a bottom-up approach starting with the fundamental building blocks of reading, and not a top-down approach as with whole word reading (memorization) methods - that's just silly, and plainly produces poor readers. Our program has a central focus of helping a child learn to read through developing phonemic awareness - one of the most critical components of reading effectively. I'll briefly describe our lesson plans and approach to teaching reading below.
Our reading lessons start with the most basic building blocks of English - the alphabet letters. We begin teaching letter names and letter sounds together. For example, letter A makes the /a/ sound. There is a far greater benefit of teaching letter names in conjunction with letter sounds, and not separately. Studies have confirmed this, and you can read more about it here.
The next step to teaching reading is blending. As mentioned, one of our central goals is to help children develop phonemic awareness, and blending is one of the common phonemic awareness skills that must be mastered to become an effective reader. Very simple blending sessions take place right from the start - after 2 or 3 letters have been learned.
Letters (name and sound) are slowly introduced in successive lessons, and along with new letters, new words using those letters are also introduced, providing ample practice for the young child to reinforce their knowledge.
Pretty soon - typically a few weeks - a young child masters blending and becomes very fluent at blending, sounding out, and reading words. Slowly, simple sentences are introduced, which sometimes pose a little difficulty for very young children, but is overcome with lots of exposure and practice.
Finally, stories and rhymes are introduced into the lesson plans, and parents are welcome to encourage their children to read more with other interesting children's books. We highly recommend "Step Into Reading" books.
The best way to teach reading is through learning phonics and phonemic awareness; however, teaching phonics rules is somewhat of a counterproductive approach to teaching reading to young children. There are many phonics rules. Can you imagine trying to teach all these different rules and their applications to a 2 or 3 year old toddler? It just wouldn't work. Trying to teach these rules will just end up confusing the poor child. So keep thing simple, short, and to the point!
Our "Children Learning Reading" program is extremely simple and superbly effective at teaching young children to become fast and efficient readers. It's so simple and effective that even 2 year old children can be taught to read using our program. Teaching a child to read at an early age provides many advantages and bestows the child with one of the most important skills in life.
