Teaching Your Child to Read

As a child, I can remember taking weekly trips to the library with my mother and sister. We’d return home with bags full of books. Lots and lots of books. So many books, in fact, that it seemed preposterous to think that we would actually read them all in one week.

It wasn’t unusual for us to read through a novel in one sitting. We read some rather lengthy ones, too; I can remember reading Gone With the Wind as well as it’s sequel, Scarlett. We read Jane Eyre. We read the Nancy Drew series. We read countless books!

We still love to read.

As a mama now myself, beginning to teach Gentry to read has been a joy. No, he’s not picking up any novels; he’s only five! But being here, leaning over him, finger under letter, as he slowly sounds out “cat” and “hat” and “dad” and “mom” is a treasure now buried deep in my heart.

We’ve enjoyed integrating the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, though we don’t use it every day. Our local homeschool co-op participated in a pre-owned curriculum sale last year and I found this gem for only a couple of dollars. Each lesson is explained well, and it moves at a good pace. It helps give us structure.

These little index cards have been handy, too, as we work at stringing words together to form simple sentences. I cut rectangles out of card stock paper, then printed (by hand) some short words we’ve been working on. After verbally giving him a short sentence to make, he must hunt for the words by sounding them out, then put them in order to form the sentence.

Teaching him to read, and read well, is very important to us. All future learning is largely determined by our ability to read. To understand the Bible, science, history, and rest of the world, we must have a hook on which to hang the information that is to follow. Reading is that hook.

Did you teach your child to read? What worked for you?


(This post is linked to Frugal Friday.)