Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Four Basic Foundations for Teaching Your Child to Read



Teaching children to read can sometimes feel like a complicated task as a homeschool mom. With so many curriculums out there, books, flashcards, helps, and the more, it seems complicated to say the least. If your a mom with a standard homeschool curriculum you can go through the motions and not even know how the curriculum is based to teach the art of reading or what your children are really doing. Whether you are using a curriculum or doing things all on your own, here are four things that are foundational in teaching children to read. These will be helpful for every homeschool mother once their children have learned their letters, sounds, and vowels.

Four Reading Basics:

1. Study Word Families:
For example, 'op', has the word family, mop, top, pop, hop, flop, crop, lop, stop, etc. Teaching your children to recognize word families becomes very helpful to them in learning to recognize words quickly. As your children learn to group words into word families, they begin to grow in their reading abilities.

2.  Phonics:
Blends, vowels, and the basic phonics rules. For example, the Long 'a' sound is found in 'bake', 'train', 'say'. Research and study those rules yourself and then reinforce the basic rules for each of the vowels through flashcards and other creative ideas. Using creative ways to teach phonics and working those rules with flashcards will help develop the ability to recognize blends and vowels. This helps greatly with the learning process. You can easily find simple vowel and blend flashcards on line.

3. Decoding:
As children move forward in reading, these four foundational rules begin to work together and decoding becomes an important aspect of the process. Children can learn to sound out words with ease as you begin to work with them in all these areas. Decoding and sounding out words is an important process of reading. Developing them in word families and phonics assists this greatly. Knowing the sounds of their letters and vowels brings them naturally to decode words. Working these things together in the process helps build their confidence and brings them to overcome the challenges. Teach your children to sound out words as well as teaching the basic phonics rules and word families.

4. Sight Words:
These are the words that break the rules. They can't be decoded and they don't fit with the phonic structure of learning. They can only be memorized and recognized. These words can be exciting to the new reader. Memorizing can be done by practicing them. As they learn the abundance of sight words available it teaches children some simple reading recognition skills and builds their confidence that they can read. They can spot sight words in any book or magazine. This not only inspires but fills in those blank places in reading. There are sight word videos available for your children to watch and learn. This can help with the process greatly.

As you begin with these four areas you will find your child quickly emerge in his/her reading level. As they practice these areas and work them, children will reach beyond themselves to read at higher levels and will be able to obtain the heights and goals set before them. Happy reading!

'enjoy great faith filled learning'
Pastor Kim



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