INSIDE: How you can teach your child to read in your homeschool!
As homeschoolers, it seems the first major hurtle is teaching our child to read. Once we accomplish that, we feel we can take on the entire homeschool journey. So today I’m sharing how to teach your child to read!
This is not a tutorial on teaching your 3 year old how to read. No, no. There are much more important things to teach at that age!
Instead, this is an overall vision for teaching your child to read along with some tips and resources along the way.
Let’s dive into how to teach your child to read!
12 Steps: How to Teach Your Child to Read
1. Create a love of books
Falling in love with books is where it all starts not choosing the perfect curriculum.
Foster this atmosphere in your home. Following are a few ways to do so.
How to create a love of books:
- Read to your child often
- Give and ask for books as gifts
- Grow a well-stocked home library
- Make library trips a fun and regular family event
- Let them see YOU read!
2. Read Aloud, dynamically
My favorite time of day is often snuggling my tribe and enjoying classic read alouds or beautiful picture book stories.
But don’t just read – read dynamically!
I remember my mother’s voice making a story come alive. It wasn’t a performance per se, but a beautiful, dynamic retelling. It made reading exciting!
I continue this tradition with my kids. They love the way I read books and often tell me, “I like the way you read best!”
To read aloud dynamically try:
- different inflections for different characters
- emphasize important descriptive words
- read slow enough
- follow punctuation!
Dynamically reading aloud not only draws our children into a story, but into the beauty of reading. They will want to read too!
3. Create phonetic awareness
When your child is young, begin pointing out letters and teaching their basic sounds.
An example: If you see a stop sign, point out the “S” tell them it makes the “ssss” sound and then sound out the word “ssstop.”
That’s it. First reading lesson done!
Continue to point out “S”s in their environment or in large-print picture books.
Another day, teach them another letter sound. Rinse and repeat.
There are a million and one preschool curiculums out there to teach your child their letter sounds, but this method is absolutely free and 100% easier to use.
Just get in the habit of doing this with your pre-readers and you won’t have to give it a second thought!
A few things that can help create phonetic awareness:
Alphabet books
There are a ton of these out there, but my children and I both gravitate toward the story-type alphabet books like the following family favorites:
Alphabet puzzles
My oldest only had one puzzle when he was little – an alphabet puzzle. He knew the entire alphabet and the basic letter sounds by the time he was 18 months old and it required no formal school time!
Alphabet bath toys
My kids received alphabet foam bath toys when they were little and they loved playing with the letters! It’s just one more way to create phonetic awareness!
We have had this super inexpensive set for 10 years!
Alphabet Go Fish Games
I’ve played this many, many times! Your children won’t even know they are learning.
We’ve owned this well-loved yet inexpensive set for many years!
4. Alphabet flashcards
After introducing your child to many different letter sounds, it can be helpful to review the ones they know with flashcards.
These lessons should be short and no pressure.
By no pressure, I mean there is no disappointment or shaming for not knowing a sound.
I DO NOT mean allowing your child to have a bad attitude. That’s an issue that needs to be addressed. (If you allow your child to have an attitude about school from the beginning, you are setting yourself up for some frustrations in the years ahead!)
In our house, these little reviews take just a couple minutes. My younger kids always want to be like their older siblings and consider doing school a privelege!
You can buy ready made flashcards or just write the alphabet on a set of index cards.
5. Gauge readiness
Don’t jump in to full-blown phonics until your child is ready. For me, a child is ready when they meet some of the following markers.
Reading Readiness Clues:
- Knows basic letter sounds
- Points out letters in environment
- Asks to learn to read
- Can do some basic blending with phonics flashcards
Once my child knows their basic phonics sounds well, I will occasionally gauge readiness by laying down a consenant-vowel-consenant word like “sat” or “cat.”
I point to each letter and have the child make the sound. We continue to read the individual sounds until they are able to blend and read the word.
There is a lot of praise in this and again, it is no pressure if the child can’t blend the word. I just put the flashcards away and try again in a couple weeks.
If my child can do this basic blending, we have fun making words with their flashcards as a new part of their daily lesson.
I do want to caution you from believing that your child’s reading will take off even if they show all the cues for readiness.
While some children can become readers seemingly overnight, for most children it usually takes years to get from basic phonics to reading on the level of the Little House series.
My oldest learned to read fluently at 7, my second at 9 (a real accomplishment considering his serious health problems), and my third at 7. By fluency I mean reading Boxcar Children or American Girl series with little to no help.
6. Beginning phonics
For some, especially beginning homeschoolers, this is where you may want to purchase a curriculum or book. It isn’t entirely necessary, but I like to have something to set out for me.
Reading Curriculum we love:
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons – people love it or hate it, but I haven’t found another resource that is as good at teaching basic blending.
A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading – a great inexpensive alternative to 100 Easy Lessons
Explode the Code – these are my favorite for daily phonics practice one my children are capable of blending proficiently and ready to move on from our little flashcard lessons.
Ready2Read – This has been a fun way to mix up our learning.
Bob Books– Great practice and confidence boosters!
Don’t forget to continue reviewing those flashcards!
7. Make Lessons Short and Sweet
Even as you begin a more structured phonics program, lessons should remain short.
For my young readers there is usually lots of praise and even cuddling together during the lesson. Reading lessons become a special time for us both!
Keeping the lessons short plays to a young child’s short attention span as well as keep the lessons light-hearted.
8. Be Consistent
What your lessons lack in length, you should make up for with consistency. For our family this means lessons five days a week.
You will accomplish much more in short 5 -10 minute lessons five days per week than 30 minutes 3 days per week.
Though the time spent is less, the constant review and work will reap bigger rewards.
9. Add-in Sight Words
Sounding out each word quickly becomes tedious and the English language is complex. To make reading faster and more enjoyable, introduce sight words.
To do so, our family uses a combination of flashcards and readers.
If my child’s curriculum or reader has a sight word in it, we write this down on a flashcard for review.
My favorite readers for sight words include:
- Faith and Freedom Readers (Catholic)
- Little Angel Readers (Catholic-also includes phonetic reading)
8. Let your Child Determine the Pace
If you are a planner like me, it is easy to want to map out your year and create expectations of where your little reader will be in a few months time or in a year.
DON’T DO THIS!
Instead, let the process naturally unfold. Don’t speculate where your reader will be.
My children have always, always, always taken a while to get from beginning phonics to fluent reader. For most children this does not happen overnight or even in a single school year.
Avoid moving on until your child has mastered a new sound/concept. If you move on too early the process will be much more difficult than needed.
9. Be patient
This goes right along with #8. Becoming fluent in reading takes time.
Be a source of encouragement to your child and lose the frustration in wondering “Why can’t they read yet?”
It’s really best not to compare yourself to other homeschoolers.
I’m an over-achiever, so it can be very humbling to me that my children have never be fluent readers at age 5 like “Little Suzy” down the block.
Instead, I focus on the fact that I am slowly and consistently giving them the tools they need to read at a pace that is just right for them!
10. Provide incentive
In our family, we offer a HUGE incentive for our fluent readers. I tell my children that as soon as they can read the Boxcar Children Book 1 on their own out loud to me they earn a Kindle!
This big incentive is a gift for them in more than one way. Once the Kindle arrives we fill it with easy chapter books for our burgeoning reader.
They are so excited to have a Kindle of their own that they are thrilled to begin reading from it daily.
We prefer the Kid’s Kindle Fire Tablet which comes with a 2 year warranty and is more durable for our rough kids.
Of course, you may want to offer smaller incentives along the way. (I’ve never been good about that.)
11. Schedule Independent Reading Time
Once you’ve given your children the tools to read through phonics and sight words, I encourage you to begin them on 10 minutes a day of independent reading.
Build up from there to 1 hour a day.
These books can be Dr. Seuss to start and then transition to Boxcar Children, Charlotte’s Web, and the Little House series, etc.
This is where your child’s reading will really take off!
This required reading time never goes away. Each day we have a required hour of quiet reading time as a family.
It’s a wonderful way for us all to relax and get in those books!
I’d love to know where you struggle teaching your child to read or what has worked for you!
You may also enjoy:
Building a Catholic Bookshelf You Love
A Required Reading List for Your Catholic Child
Thank you for a great post! My first child was “little Suzy” who was reading fluently at age 4, so I have been getting very discouraged with my second, who is almost six and still struggling to sound out words like “cat” and “dog” after well over a year of phonics instruction. Thank you for the reminder to let each one learn at his own pace!
Thanks for stopping by and chatting too! I think for most kids it is a long journey. I might say my child can read, but what that means is different for different people. For me, reading means being able to read the Boxcar Children without help! God bless your reading journey!