Teaching to Read Tips

It's hard to believe that I'm finally teaching my last child to read.  Thirteen years after first starting this teaching to read journey, we're finally on the home stretch.

In the process, I'm thinking about what has worked for all five girls.  Bear in mind that my experience is all with girls, so my tips may not be as applicable to boys... And, of course, every child is different, but here are a few things that might help if you're just starting.

Remember your priorities!
It's so easy to get excited about this first step in "real" schooling and to lose track of why you're doing it.  You can find yourself sacrificing the relationship with your child if you start pushing them to reach arbitrary benchmarks.  Please, please, please IGNORE all the "shoulds".  "Amy should know her letters by now."  "Children should be sounding out CVC words by this age." "Michael should be able to blend sounds at this year level." 

Keep it fun and relaxed.
There is no faster way to put a kid off reading than sitting them down for an age to read a long list of unrelated words.  Personally, I like my kids to learn to read by doing "real" reading.  We start with super short, simple stories.  For my eldest, I created stories of four short sentences.  "The cat is fat.  The cat sat on the hat.  The hat is flat."  Another method is to find easy words (repeated ones are especially good) in a favourite story and get your child to read them.  Hairy McClary stories have wonderful rich language, but they also often have a word that gets repeated a lot that a child can read.  There are many other books that you will find that may be far too hard for your child to read, but have a word or two that they can read.

Work together
There definitely comes a time when a kid needs to read on their own with NO help from you, but early on, be ready to jump in and help with difficult words or remind them of a letter sound.  Avoid shaming or impatience, just say something like: "oh, that's a quite a long word, it's "together"".  If you help them with bigger words, it means you can read books that are a little more fun and complicated.

Break it down.
No need to read a whole book in a day.  It may be a sentence, or a page, or two pages - try to stop before it gets tedious for both of you.

Model, model, model.
After my five-year-old reads a page or a story or sometimes just a sentence, I will read it to her and point out the words as we go.  It's a reward for her effort, and then she gets to focus on the story while consolidating in her brain the "look" of each word.

Give strategies along the way.
Whether it's breaking down big words into smaller pieces, or teaching the sounds that certain groups of letters make, or teaching that an exclamation mark is "loud and excited", pointing it out along the way helps make the rules stick (just try to do it at the end of a sentence or paragraph so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story).

Be patient!
Oh boy!  This has been so hard for me.  All four other girls seem to desperately need my immediate help with something every time I sit down for a fifteen minute reading lesson with the youngest, but it's so important I don't rush through it, even when there are so many other things to do in the day.  Just tonight, Pepper (the youngest) couldn't remember the word "I".  It would be easy to lose my cool and give her a lecture about how many times she has read that word in the last few months.  But it wouldn't help.  Sometimes, what our kids do just doesn't make sense.  The read one sound in the word and then just guess the rest.  Or, as Pepper was doing, they read everything with an 'h' as 'sh'.  Or a bunch of other seemingly random and weird stuff.  Try to remember that reading is a HUGE feat for our brains!  For most of human history literacy has been the exception, not the norm.  Be patient with the process and don't assume that just because your kid reads a word TOTALLY wrong they're being rebellious or naughty, even if they read it right 500 times before.  Maybe they are, but bite your tongue, be patient and pay attention.

Read the signs.
Once again, we can get a bit excited and then push our kids to keep going for too long.  Be careful.  You don't want to burn out that precious little brain, because, believe it or not, it has a lot of other work to do as well!  If they're getting the fidgets, if they're struggling with words that were easy yesterday, if they keep losing their place, if there are tears... It might be time for a break.  Poppy hated how I used to get her to do star jumps and run around the house and all sorts of other things before reading, but it really did help her to hold the book and her head still enough to actually follow the text.  Looking back, I'm sure I could have done a lot better with her (refer to "be patient" above), but thankfully she is a very competent reader despite my mistakes!

Don't squash the sillies too soon.
Some days they'll just be silly.  Deliberately reading words wrong or... whatever.  Take a breath and don't get serious too fast.  Remember, you want your kid to have a positive association with reading.  There is no rush.  Really.  Truly.  I have a 17-year-old.  We were (mostly) very relaxed and she is perfectly well equipped for whatever she chooses to do next.  Poppy, 15, has a shelf full of neuroscience and Psychology-related books she is working through reading because she wants to be a counsellor.  She has already read books like The Brain that Changes Itself and The Decisive Moment. I was even more relaxed with Ivy, the 13-year-old and she reads faster than I do.  No, they are not unusually gifted - they're perfectly ordinary young ladies.  Let there be time for silliness.  They will still be able to get into college (if they want).  Trust me.

I know I said it already.  Remember your priorities.
Hopefully your priorities for your kids are something along the lines of a good relationship with God and a good relationship with the family.  Remember those.  Live by them.  Don't let any academic goal get in the way of those priorities.  That way, when, at some point, you encounter the inevitable obstacle, you'll know what to do.  You'll get down on your knees.

Happy teaching!