How I Teach My Kids to Read

When I first started homeschooling, I kept hearing moms talk about how they did not feel equipped to teach their children Algebra. As a former Algebra teacher, I felt pretty confident in that arena. But what I was most scared of was teaching phonics!

I love reading and have been an avid reader for most of my life. However, I could not have broken down any phonics rules for you prior to teaching my oldest son.

When Big Brother was 2, he was in private speech therapy. When he “graduated” out of therapy, the therapist recommended that we begin a phonics program at age 3. So on his third birthday, we began the full Abeka K4 program. I wanted to make sure to do it just right, so we did every single worksheet and exercise. A month later, we were both in tears! I was panicked because he didn’t understand the concept of blending and he was stressed out by anything having to do with school.

Now, do not get me wrong. Abeka is a GREAT program. We just hit it too fast and too hard. We needed a change up, and I learned that my kids need to learn to read at their own pace. Here are my six steps for teaching my kids how to read, along with the curriculum that I use!

Adopt a Book Culture

From the time my kids are born, we indoctrinate them into book culture. This is so important for learning to read! They look through picture books, we read books together, and we teach them to care for books. Most kids who are around books all of the time want to learn how to read!

Learn the Letter Sounds

Around three to four years old, most children are interested in learning letter names and sounds. No formal program is needed for this! We point out letters around us, sing the alphabet song, sing a song for the letter sounds, and help our children learn how to spell their name. I also love doing letter crafts with our kids! Look out for Letter of the Week craft kits coming to our online store Spring of 2021.

Around this stage, I love letting our children watch Leap Frog Letter Factory (the original DVD, not the series on Netflix). We also have two sets of Leap Frog magnets on our refrigerator, letters and numbers. When you place a letter or number magnet into the main magnet, it sings its name and sound or counts the number out. We go around singing the letter sounds all the time after watching this movie or playing with our magnets.

Work on Pre-reading Skills and Learn to Blend

Once again, no formal materials are needed to focus on pre-reading skills. Help your child learn how to count syllables, point out rhyming words in poems, and point out alliteration. Ask them to identify the beginning, middle, and ending sound of various words. For our boys, we began working on these pre-reading skills around age four.

If you would like curriculum to help teach pre-reading skills, we have used All About Reading Pre-Reading. I don’t use the full set though! I purchased the teacher’s manual, cards, and readers used for fifteen dollars. I use a frog hand puppet in place of Ziggy the Zebra and we do a letter craft or coloring sheet with each lesson in place of the student activity book.

Once your child has mastered most of their letter names and sounds and WANTS to learn how to read, it is time to start working on blending letters together. You could start with whatever phonics program that you hope to use in the future, you could develop a plan on your own, or you could use blending ladders from Abeka or Teachers Pay Teachers.

I like to use Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried. This book uses an adapted version of the Distar method. We only use the first 15-20 lessons of the book before moving onto our preferred phonics program. This gives our kids a little bit of a head start on blending before moving onto a more quickly paced course.

Focus on Phonics

There are two primary methods of teaching children to read: phonics based approaches and whole-word based approaches (also known as “look-say” or “sight word” methods).

Phonics is a systematic approach to teaching children the sounds that letters and groups of letters make called phonemes. The 26 letters of the alphabet can create 44 different sounds. A phonics program will teach the child these sounds as well as the rules of when letters make each sound. Approximately 97% of the English language can be decoded through phonics. Because some of our words are adopted from other languages, they might not be decoded through phonics and must be learned as “sight words.”

The look say method was originally introduced by Rev. Thomas Gallaudet to educate the deaf through sight words. It was championed by Horace Mann, the father of the public school system (who ironically homeschooled his own children), in the mid-19th century and the look-say method is widely used in public schools today. Multiple government-funded research studies on reading instruction were done between the 1960s and 1980s finding that the move away from systematic phonics methods may be causing the nations reading problems. However, most classrooms continue to use the look-say method to teach reading.

I prefer a phonics approach over a look say or “sight word” approach because children are able to later decode any word they come across and I believe it encourages a love for reading.

When we are ready to dive head first into phonics instruction, we begin using All About Reading Level 1 and work our way through the four levels. You could use whichever phonics program you would like at this point (including 100 Easy Lessons).

Practice, Practice, Practice

I keep a lot of early readers at our house. We use the Bob Books series and Abeka K4 and K5 readers as well as the readers that are a part of the All About Reading program. My kids love that they can finally read books!

We use a sticker chart for our Bob books. They get a sticker for the first three times they read each book in Collections 1-3. Once they read all of a collection, they get a special treat.

I also LOVE Dr. Seuss books because he used a lot of nonsensical words that are completely decodable with phonics. This allows me to check whether my child has memorized a word list or actually knows how to use the rules we have been practicing.

REWARD TIME

We have a special reward for finishing the fourth level of All About Reading! Because they are now able to read so well, they are able to play a game that requires a lot of reading. I have my old Gameboy Color and Big Brother got to play my old Pokémon game once he finished the fourth level. We will probably use the same game with Middle Man but any reward that involves using their new reading skill is a plus!