Best resources for teaching reading

[flowery]

Hope someone can help. I have a 4yo DS who isn't due to go to school until September but is already reading pretty well. He was desperate to learn, and wants to read several times a day, and is already sounding out words up to 5 letters long, and learning some of the tricky words that don't follow phonics rules as well.

This is all lovely but he's coming on so quickly and it's taken me by surprise a bit, and I want to be sure I'm guiding and helping him in the best way and not doing it "wrong" or causing a future problem for his teacher next year.

With DS1, he wasn't reading until he was at school so it was much easier.

If anyone has any good links for advice guiding children that would be fantastic.

TIA

I used the Jelly & Bean phonics readers. There is lots of free info on the website.

Thanks Bonsoir that's really helpful will check that out. I think DS1 had a few Jelly and Bean books from school.

I did some Jelly and Bean with DD at the same stage last year. She loved them. I think they're good for younger ones.

He's mostly doing the ORT at the moment, as we have a box set of those at home. He manages level 2 fairly well and is having a go at level 3 as well. I remember liking the Jelly and Bean books DS1 brought home, and the website looks brilliant with all sorts of teaching guides, which is great.

I'm just feeling a bit.. unqualified really!

I did a lot of research and found that Jelly & Bean were the easiest to use in a one-to-one setting (eg at home or with a tutor - we are not in the UK). Most reading schemes are designed for classroom use, for obvious reasons.

Jelly & Bean are very non-threatening for the smallest DC and are culturally unspecific so good for use with DC who don't know the UK or live very rurally.

DS is 4 and at school as an Aug Birthday. He likes the website game 'Teach Your Monster to Read'. His reading is coming on well now from a low starting point in Sept and I was actually wondering how he would be doing if a Sept Birthday and still at nursery. I know they run the same curriculum but they don't structure the same way as the school does.

we like songbirds phonics in our house

Good work, but do make sure you are using the CORRECT sounds for phonics: so "mmmmm" not "muh" and "sssss" not "suh".

Have a look at my book review in MN review section, under 'children's educational books and courses', the Oxford Phonics Spelling Dictionary, which will give you good guidance.

Thanks everyone this is great.

Yep, definitely using correct phonics sounds Ferguson, we learned about them from the school when DS1 was in reception, and DS2s nursery are also doing those. :)

Jelly and bean books are brilliant. I like the Oxford reading tree songbird books and Ruth miskin books. Dd has used Dandelion readers and Collins Big Cat Phonics books at school and they are good as well.

I think its important to have a range of authors to give a varied vocabulary and variety of stories.

If you're ever uncertain of how to sound a digraph (two letter sound) or trigraph (three letter sound) I recommend googling the sound and "Geraldine the giraffe".

Ds is five and thinks Geraldine is hilarious.

one of a vast array

I find the songbird phonics great as there is a helpful crib sheet in the front to explain the sounds in that book. The stories are fun too (as written by Julia Donaldson so a bit more engaging than some reading books). On amazon you can get 6 books in 1 for each stage which works out quite cheap. Ds1 is nearly through to the last lot of them now.

Songbirds are very good, but I found the lower level ones not so great for little ones (ie nursery age). That's where Jelly and Bean worked well for us. Then in YR DD has done Songbirds/RWI. She's zipped through RWI due partly to all the practise we did last year I think. I've discovered the harder songbirds ones (didn't do these with DS) and have found them fab for practising the "harder" sounds in context with a good story- these www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Reading-Tree-Songbirds-Stories/dp/0192793020/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3

and now she's onto the Magic Key, so a whole new world is emerging .