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School-Aged Children
how do you teach your child to read
I have a 5 year old son who will be entering kindergarten in the fall. Although he loves being read to, which we do often and have since he was a newborn, he has not shown any real interest in learning how to read himself. I do point to the words as I read them, but I don't think he's really looking. My question is how do you teach your kids to read - does it come naturally, or do you have to kind of have 'lessons'?
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Re: how do you teach your child to read
My DD picked it up a month after KG started. She did Prek4 in our public school system where she learned beginning phonetics and blending skills. In KG, they focused on sight words (10 per week) and rhythming (at the beginning of school). I think it was a combination of learning to read strategies. DD loves to play on starfall dot com (which has beginning reading skills) and PBS kids. We also read to her a lot and allow her to read to us (in appropriate books). I hear the BOB books are great but we have an old school book that DD does well reading out of; it was MH.
DD is in the top reading group (level C "College") and as soon as she it that reading group her conduct grade went from S (satisfactory- highest) to I (improving-middle). (Nor sure that it correlates). She has since gotten better after a discussion on talking during class. DD is very much a talker (its her nature).
thank you so much for responding...you are right - I learned to read very young, and I was super bored in school for several years. Since it came pretty naturally to me as a child, I was starting to wonder if I wasn't doing enough. He had a brain hemorrhage at birth, too, so I do tend to worry with him...
I do like the idea of labeling everything and think we may try that- couldn't hurt!
thanks shopgirl78 - it's good to know how quickly your daughter started reading once kindergarten started. My son is in prek in our public school system, too, and they do work on understanding what sounds the letters make, but that's about it as far as pre-reading, I think. They don't do much in the way of handwriting, either, and my son is still having some trouble with that, too...
I'll have to look for the BOB books - hadn't heard of them before. I learned with McGuffey's Readers - very old school!
DS started with word building at 4.5 y/o. Bob books were really good for that. But, he had a good foundation for understanding the letters and letter sounds to begin with. This year he's mostly been learning sight words, which I kind of hate, but it's working.
At 4, I would just make it fun. I really like the LeapFrog letter and word factory DVDs and Bob books. And, just reading to them is probably the best thing you can do. We used to play a lot of games with sounding words beginning, middle and end sounds out too b/c DS would ask what words were a lot. The rest he's learned in school, which has worked out well.
How much time do you spend reading to him? Do you just read at bedtime, or other times during the day?
Do you point out road signs, store names, etc. when you are out?
You could try increasing the frequency of your reading. I realized there are days when I spend 1.5 hrs. reading to our kids! That kind of shocked me, but I think the payoff is huge.
I agree with the PPs that since you've been reading to him all along, I'd expect that he will pick it up quickly once he's in school. For our 7 year old, we really did nothing to teach him to read. We've always read to him, and he is at a very high reading level with no real "work" on our part.