When and how did you start teaching your kid to read?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Op here. Thanks for all the great tips and suggestions. We do read to dd everyday. We prob read about three bookstore her. I wish we read to her more but we both work full time and there seems to be such limited hours in the day!
I will probably purchase the book recommended. It does seem like she may be a little behind her peers, in that she still has trouble recognizing letters and really doesn't know their sounds.
Thanks again.

IIRC, the 100 Lessons book starts right off with sounding out words and recognizing what letters do in various contexts. It will not teach her letters and their sounds.

This is not correct. Although I agree that it might be good to have some outside exposure to letters and sounds, the 100 lessons book teaches both. First, it teaches sounds. The first 10-20 lessons are all about sounds. Once a few sounds are taught, it starts to teach how to combine those sounds while still teaching more sounds. Usually the sounds are taught and reinforced for several lessons before being incorporated into the words. The learning and practice of individual sounds and simple sound combinations continues throughout the whole book, during each lesson, even when there is more concentration on reading stories, comprehension, and punctuation. 100 Lessons does not teach letters until sometime between the 70th and 80th lesson. The theory, which makes a lot of sense in my opinion, is that you actually don't need the letter names to learn to read and knowing them actually makes it a little confusing at first because it doesn't matter how you say a letter as much as the sound that it makes. But, but lesson 80, there is instruction on the names of the letters. This comes at the same time as capitalization rules are introduced. Often we think that you should learn letter names and capitalization concepts first, but 100 Lessons illustrates that these are actually more advanced concepts that are less integral to learning to read.

This makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't know completely how it plays out if the child does not first recognize the letters, as I didn't start the book until after my child could identify her letters. Maybe someone else has insight.

[Anonymous]

We started reading to them from infancy and they are strong readers but I'm one of those "crunchy" types that believes in natural learning and we avoided all those 'teach your baby/child to read' products.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We started reading to them from infancy and they are strong readers but I'm one of those "crunchy" types that believes in natural learning and we avoided all those 'teach your baby/child to read' products.

You know that there is a lot of difference between teaching a baby and teaching a child to read, right? Some kids, like mine, beg to learn so it makes more sense to give them a more organized vehicle in addition to continued parent/child reading time. My child would get very frustrated that she could not read it all, so the reading lessons have helped to make her feel more secure and get her able to read more independently on a more regular basis, as she had been requesting.

[Anonymous]

We read to our son pretty much since the day he was born. We are a bilingual household, and none of these languages is English. My Mom stayed with us for six months when he was one, and she has a thing for reading, so she taught him to recognize all the Cyrillic letters. Looking at her, my DH got motivated to teach him all the Arabic ones. He's two now and he can sound and identify pretty much all of Cyrillic and Arabic letters. We are not really doing anything formal about "teach to read" other than just reading to him a lot and asking him to name letters every now and again (for instance, in his books the first letter in a chapter will be big, so I'll ask, "what is this" and he'll respond). That's basically it. God only knows what will become of this experiment later and how English will enter the equation, but I figured we'd do what we can while we can.

I don't really care when and how he begins to read as long as he comes out with a love of reading. Right now he has the love of books as an object to maul.

[Anonymous]

I guess from around 18 months-- without any program or lessons. We are also pretty adamant about natural learning. We are TV free and do not buy battery operated toys. It started with casual pointing out letters, learning letter sounds, blending, pointing out sight words, memorizing short books, then reading. We just read a whole lot and we were lucky in some ways that our child was one to sit still and pay attention to anything. DC is just turned four and reads at a second grade level ad still loves books. We have never made reading a chore.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The BOB books are also great and super fun for this age group. They are these little tiny 5-6 page books and go in a progression. The first one has like 5 words. They get more difficult as the child gets more confidence. My DD loved being able to read these to herself and was super proud whenever she finished one.

Also, you might want to check out starfall.com if you are not opposed to a little screen time. The section on letters/letter sounds is fun!

I'm the first PP who mentioned this site, but just wanted to highlight it again. The games on the site for teaching letter sounds / phonics seem really fun and have been really effective for our kid and a couple others we've known. We also did some sounding out of books, etc. while reading together just because she seemed interested, but to be honest I probably shouldn't be the one teaching my kid phonics anyway, since I was an 80s kid during the era of 'whole language' and my grasp of official phonics rules has always been a bit shaky. (As I'm discovering now that my kid is getting really into dinosaurs and I'm confronted with things like Rhamphorhynchus, Caudipteryx and Yixianosaurus

The site was also great for us in that our kid really enjoyed it and ASKED for it as her screen time / a reward. So it was sort of a win-win in our household where she was getting a 'treat' that seemed to help her learn to read.