Nearly 4yo has asked me to teach him to read...

[Pheebe]

...should I and where should we start??

Not really entirely a home ed question but DS1 is 4 at the end of september and won't be starting school until 2009. A few weeks ago he asked me to teach him to read. He's been learning letters etc at nursery anyway and we do the whole a is for apple thing with him too. We have also read to him before bedtime since he was a baby and he loves to look at his books and tell his own stories.

I've bought a couple of those galt books and have been slowly 'playing' our way through them with him. He loves to draw his letters and numbers over dots and seems to 'get' it and remember things.

I'm worried about getting it wrong though, what if I teach him wrongly and confuse him? Where do we go next when/how should we introduce phonics. Should I stop and wait til he starts school or plough on making it a game and letting him lead me at his own pace??? Argggg...any help advice book suggestions gratefully received

I would jump on his enthusiasm and not worry about confusing him. If he can read before starting school he won't be the first child in the world to do so.

My mother taught me to read before I started school in the 60s. She used the ITA method - now severely discredited - because she knew it would be used by the school when I did start.

Miraculously I seem to have survived that universally slated method and my mother's handling of it, without becoming a confused adult illiterate.

Hi
In my view, the best thing is to be guided by your son. If you can still get hold of them, the Peter and Jane and Janet and John books are an excellent resource.

(Yes, I know, I am showing my age. I learnt to read using them and was happily reading before I went to school at 4 and 1/2)

If you can teach him to read, at his pace, and encourage a love of learning and reading BEFORE he goes to school, he will be at a great advantage.

You cannot really do anything wrong.

Offer him love, support, encouragement and put as many different books in front of him as you can. Read to him and then allow him to read back to you.

Learning to read with phonics is a subject that has caused much debate. Its effectiveness has been called into question on numerous occasions.

Phonics works well in phonetic languages such as Spanish, where each letter always has the same sound. For example "a" would always be pronounced "a as in bat".

English is not a phonetic language and this is one of the major downsides of trying to teach children to read using phonics.

It is also one of the reasons why there is a generation of 20-somethings, who can't spell!

Just my thoughts.
Amanda Goldston
www.GoldstonAcademyForTheInsane.com

ds could read at 3 and a half. I taught him to say the letters phonetically and squeeze them together, saying them without gaps. He got it straight away and was reading Mr Men books the next day. I kid you not!

I have just bought these for DS. His school uses ORT so I thought they would be a good start. They are very simple and he seems to enjoy reading them. They come with a parents guide which was quite interesting.

school's reading scheme (not using phonics): one of first words "scales"

reading corner phonics: one of first words "cat"

Yes, let's not use phonic-based reading schemes.

Thanks everyone, you've given me the confidence now.

I remember the janet and john books too and we'll check out the ORT ones too

thanks

if i were you i taught my ds3 his letter sounds and squeezed them together to make words we started when he was very small perhaps as young as 2 with letterland and making the sounds dippy duck ddd eddie elephant eh eh eh etc ......soon he ws reding well and although hes H.E he is high up on the ORT .

Having said that teaching reading is tricky and a child can only read when that 'button' clicks,my middle ds had exactly the same encouragement with the books and letterland comics yet still couldnt read so well at nearly 7- the way i picture reading is like fitting the last piece in on a jigsaw you try it all ways then suddenly it just fits in and becomes obvious.

thanks windy, i think you're right

I'll go at his pace and see if it clicks for him

he so wants to learn his letters and numbers and be able to read so we'll see

i bet he picks it up real quick and starts reading the stories on the womens magazines in tesco like my ds or even the mens magazines lol ......my ds whose 7 said oh look mum the 50 hottest women (in nuts or some other mag) shall we get it for daddy?

I'm a book publisher and one of my friends at a publisher called Summersdale has just reissued the Janet and John books - so you should be able to get them really easily!

great, thanks snowymum I'll track them down, I have lovely memories of sitting with my parents and reading those

windy 50 hottest women lololol

I'm a past home educator and now a remedial reading tutor. I pick up the children who have been damaged by whole-word/language methods. You'd very unwise to use a non-phonic reading programme. The fact is that synthetic phonics reading programmes are the only ones that have scientific evidence to back up their effectiveness. Choose something like Jolly Phonics, follow its directions closely and your child will learn to read quickly and easily.
www.jollylearning.co.uk

You might be interested in this blog posting by a home educating dad:

Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation the hard way. 'The skill of sounding out simple words, that she had been able to do shortly after she turned three, had been completely lost. If she didn't know a word by sight, she was stuck. Now, with that memory of hers that was able to memorize the 50 states by age two, she could get around this problem without too much trouble: she could just get someone else to read it for her a time or two, and then she would remember the word thereafter, and could even recognize it in new sentences. But this was still a work-around (although an effective one); even if a word was in her spoken vocabulary, she couldn't recognize it on the page if she hadn't seen it before in print, even if it was totally phonetically regular, with all short-vowel sounds. And when she came to these words she didn't recognize, she would try to guess, coming up either with nonsense words or with words that were similar-looking (same starting and ending letter, totally different middle), or with a synonym that bore no visual resemblance to the correct word on the page.' tdpower.blogspot.com/2007/09/phonics-vs-sight-recognition-reading.html

For more advice and information about teaching reading: www.dyslexics.org.uk

Very helpful, thanks Maverick. I have looked at the jollyphonics program and I think thats the one his school will use too

Has anyone else got any expereince of using Doman's "how to teach your baby to read" methodology? I am currently doing this with my non-verbal baby (11 months) and would be interested to compare notes, especially in terms of having a sense that your baby is "getting it" rather than just liking the colours red, white and black?

sorry to hijack thread.

Sorry, I don't. I have to say this sounds like such overwhelming hothouseing - why on earth would you want to do this? Is it for real? Or are you joking? Can you post a link?

avenanp... your ds was reading mr men books at 3.5???????

really??

I havent beeen a member of mn very long but have seen so many posts like this that I am thinking of writing to the papers and saying do you know how many geniuses are being raised by mumsnetters

If your child really could do this then I apologise for the sarcasm

Highly recommend Read Write Inc's parent handbook to help you understand how your child may learn to read and what you can do to help.

Very good combined with their flashcards.

Lindenlass

My honest reason for doing it is that she is bilingual but will have little contact with French speakers except me so I want her to be able to read in French and so have access to a wider range of native-quality French than I alone can give her, the sooner the better.

Doman has been working since the 1950s, initially teaching "brain-damaged" (his word) children to read then, when they started outperforming "normal" children, realising that the latter were probably underperforming. His technique is based no word recognition in very large print sizes and is exceptionally well established and well-known - the core text is freely available in ordinary bookshops.

I agree it smacks of hot-housing but my child seems to like the activities. If she didn't, I would stop instantly. That doesn't mean that they are definitely working - time will tell on that one - only that they might be working and she appears to enjoy it so it seems a no-lose gamble to me.

The web site is

www.gentlerevolution.com