How Did You Teach Your Child to Read?

[ADifferentTeapotofChips]

Just that really.

We may be home educating from September. The enormity of teaching ds to read seems overwhelming. The thought of it scares me slightly, and yet I really want to do this.

I am guessing other people have felt like this, at some point too.

Can you please share your experiences with me? At the moment ds is 4, and nursery have taught him to write his name.

Be readers yourselves, as parents.
Read to him. Read to him. Read to him.

Put closed captions on whenever a video or dvd is playing.

There are loads of shows (eg alpha blocks) and games (eg Teach your monster to read) that help with early literacy.

It's not really a big deal; the key each time in my family was for the child to discover things they were desperate to read more often than adults were willing to sit and read them to them...

Everything Omm says plus phonics has been brilliant for us particularly for DS who has processing and memory issues. We had phonics cards so could make a pile with a particular phoneme for him to work through.
Playing games in the car is popular too, I-spy, I’m thinking of an animal beginning with...,

Chatting about words, saying aloud ‘that’s a funny spelling I wonder why it’s like that. Let’s look it up. Oh look it’s from the Greek word for .....’

There are lots of ways which have worked for different children.

Rather than answering the question you asked, first I'll pose you a different one: why do we care so much about children's reading that this one skill seems to dominate early years education, and are we right to be so concerned about it?

I don't for a moment argue that literacy is unimportant in our society. It is key, absolutely. A functionally illiterate adult is bound to have a very hard time coping in life. However, basic literacy is a skill which nearly everyone can manage to acquire, so why actually worry about it? Why take active steps to promote it at an early age? I mean, did you worry much about whether your son might prove quite unable to walk? That too was a possibility, and growing to adulthood unable to walk would have affected his life in many ways. But you probably trusted that this would come to him in its own time, as it does to most children.

IMO the answer to why reading and writing dominate school education is because the school system itself relies so heavily on that particular skill. The very high ratio of children to adults at school means that reading is a key method of instruction there. Similarly, children are given written tests to assess what they know because the teachers are unable to spend enough time with them individually to observe what they know or discover what they know in conversation.

And then the resultant self-esteem problem rears its head. Schoolchildren know they are expected to learn to read young. This matters above all else in their education. No wonder that they often feel they are stupid if they can't do it, and angry if they don't yet want to do it. As they get older, if they still can't read, the fear of failure sometimes causes them to switch off and stop trying.

By contrast, a home educated child doesn't need to be able to read well from an early age in order to get a good education, nor does he have to write fluently so that educators know whether he understands the material. They learn from conversation, from doing things, from having parents read to them, from watching documentaries. Their parents have no performance targets and don't really need to test them, but if we do want to know whether they understand, we can just talk to them and watch them. So there's no time pressure on us.

And with that pressure off, reading and writing can be tackled at an age when the child is very likely to be developmentally ready for it, and when he has discovered his own motivation to do it. Ensuring that both of those factors are in place makes it much much much easier. You probably weren't dragging your unwilling eleven month old baby around on his legs trying to make him walk when he wasn't interested and quite possibly couldn't have done it even if he wanted to. The fact that SOME babies can walk at that age wouldn't have swayed you, nor would the fact that with hothousing, your baby's progress might have been accelerated a bit. You knew that in the long run, it wouldn't matter whether he first walked before or after his first birthday. When he wanted to walk and was ready, he applied all of his determination and you couldn't have stopped him picking up that skill if you'd tried.

Peter Gray has some fascinating and reassuring observations on home educated children who learn to read in their own time: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read . I think if you spend enough time around the many home educated kids who have followed vastly differing paths to reading competency, you'll start to feel more relaxed about the reading/writing bugbear. Ask the parents of older children, as you are doing here, how it worked out. You can also read home ed blogs.

The school perspective on reading - the earlier the better, and definitely by the late primary years - tends to instill a greater panic in us than it needs to. I doubt any of us HE parents are completely immune to it. But ultimately, we do have the option of turning our backs on that system, taking inspiration from the example of other home educated kids and most importantly from our own child.

Thank you for answering. It has been very reassuring to read your replies.

I taught DD to read when she was 4 because she wanted to learn. She kept picking books up and asking me what the words were so it made sense to teach her, because she was ready.

But DS is very different. He started off in school and has continually struggled with a busy learning environment. He has learned slowly and fallen far behind. But now we HE, he is catching up. He took years to crack reading and, had he been at home from the start, we wouldn't have started so young. He wasn't ready. And his handwriting is years behind what the school would have wanted.

So, I would say take your lead from your own child and help them learn when they say they are ready. Then it won't be a huge task, it should come naturally.

Thank you.

My thinking is very much as Saracen posted above.
Just read to them all the time
My eldest decided she wanted to write & copied words out age 5 from which she learnt to decode from 6 a switch flicked & she's been reading several chapter books a day ever since.
Middle same kind of age but it was comic books that he learnt from. At 6 he reads comic books (graphic novels really - amulet etc) constantly & can read any information boards etc that he wants to but still put off by full chapter books (unless they are fighting fantasy!)

I have friends who tell me their kids learnt almost overnight at 11 in order to read the instructions for a computer game

As others have said, take your lead from the child. Some Scandi countries don't begin formal instruction until age 7 plus.

Lots of informal stuff you can do in the meantime between age 4 and 6 - gently play based learning of letters (hide and seek?) and some easy 3 letter words (pin, web, bed) and easy phonemes (chunks of sound) if you want (oo sound, ee sound).

Easy high frequency words are useful too (google for lists of these - the, a, and, to, get and so on). You can make a game playing with them (memory game) and use words with a picture for slowly getting common whole words into memory (colours and numbers for example).

There are so many free/cheap resources out there - web, charity shops and library. We have made a 'treasure chest' at home with home made word cards. DS picks at random, then we stick in a scrap book called 'words I know' when he knows them. It nice to celebrate what they learn.

Also - there are good days and bad days. If they are not in the mood, leave it and try again another time.

DS wasn't ready when he went to school (age almost 5) for reading and writing. I think if we had begun age 7 we would have made as much progress without slogging over it. Hindsight is a great thing though! Make sure you have their eyes checked and bear in mind dyslexia if they struggle later on. These are 2 relevant things to us currently hence I mention them.

Thank you for answering me. I love the idea of a scrapbook to record and celebrate each word learnt.

I'm mostly a structured home educator and with four kids who did not teach themselves to read (my most motivated diligent child took by far the longest to really click on the basic reading skills), I used phonics methods tweaked for each of them. I've used a lot of old free systems that others have made more accessible. I've tried quite a few newer things, but we've always gone back to those.

Beyond reading to them and discussing books like alphabet books, I actually found videos and cards quite helpful for letter sounds for my younger two. The Leapfrog Letter Factory and Word Factory and Preschool Prep's phonics series were both well enjoyed and seemed to help most. We would also play games with cards with letter sounds - which one goes [sound(s)], which one does your name start with, and sometimes just going through them like flashcards which my youngest liked to do as fast as possible and then cackle.

Once they feel confident and mostly mastered that, my older two moved onto words with Don Potter's Blend Phonics which is a PDF rewrite of an old reading programme, essentially word lists by sounds. I would write on a whiteboard across our laps, sound by sound, while they read through and then they would copy. I still recommend it for kids moving quickly, but my third child really struggled here, so thankfully on the Well Trained Mind forums, one woman who teaches older children and adults to read did an outline of how to use Webster Spellers to teach syllables, reading, and basic spelling for younger kids which was turned into a helpful PDF that's easy to tweak. The syllables really helped my third and my youngest is about to finish that. He uses that two days a week alternated on the other two with this concentration card game which makes phonetic nonsense words, and on the final day of our week, he does Starfall. Again, often while cackling because now he knows which ones makes the noises that drives his siblings mad.

I then use Piper Book's version of I See Sam reader books which I bought for my oldest and are still somehow intact. These are what really made reading click for my oldest. He could sound things out well but this was what helped him from decoding to reading. They read through and we discuss (the BRI 1 books have helpful questions). Again, my third needed more support so alongside that we did Ultimate Phonics's free word list which, like Blend Phonics, is word lists by sound but broken up a lot more into shorter lessons, more repetition, and includes sentences. She would read the lists, any she missed we would do sound by sound on the whiteboard, she would read the sentences and then pick one for copywork and then do a Piper book.

She finished those last year and now she reads aloud short stories. That is one thing I very much learned as a mistake from my older two - once they read well and could discuss books, they preferred to read on their own and then discuss with me and each other which at the time I was fine with, especially with my second child who is an early bird up at around six every day so she gets up and reads and then talks to me, but I then found that when I did have my older two read something outloud, their pronunciation of some complex words would be off. I did try a few multisyllabic programmes, especially with my oldest (who has a language delay and a stammer) as it was recommended to help him read and speak more smoothly but I didn't find them more helpful than just regularly having him read aloud. Reading is a complex skill and continuing to have them read aloud even now into teendom helps catch those odd words, work on tone while reading and other speaking and reading skills. I only wish I'd continued with that. Right now, my older two have a mix of books they read, discuss and write on themselves and read aloud books/poems/plays.

That's pretty much it for us. As I said, I'm a structured home educator, I like simple open and go and talk about plans which all of these are. I agree with Saracen that schools are often pushed to drag out these basics during the day to fit how they want to do things but have too little resources for the one on one I think helps best. I mean, my youngest - his reading, writing, and maths take about 30 minutes if he drags his feet, we can get through it in half that when he's eager. Just having the routine of working on these things does wonders, I find.

I am a teacher and have taught hundreds of dcs to read but adopted a different method to teach my own dd at home. She really wanted to learn at 3. So everyday we wrote something in a copy about the day. I wrote it and she read it. Stuck in pictures..drew stuff. My sentences began with her name and a few simple words and then got more complex but still personal. She was a fluent reader before long. I also used magnetic letters to write her silly notes. Just mix it into the day. Buy magnetic letters and a board with alphabet in small not capitals and make small words like red cat van etc. And absolutely read to her every day. Use the library. Have fun.

Thank you very much for the tips.