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How did you teach your child to read?


Slache
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The same way I was taught: Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons.

Except, I went through the school version (Reading Mastery) and had a good handle on how to tailor it to my kids, being pretty confident on what to skip, what to keep, how to review..

At the end of that book we just kept going with reading, and then focused on comprehension with the Elson readers.

 

Adding; with the youngest we worked on a lot of prereading skills like learning part-to-whole puzzles, speeding up sounds, sound discrimination games...and started the book when he found them easy to do.

The oldest, I had a limited window to teach him correctly before he went to a school that sent out tidbits like "let them guess based on the picture" and "it's okay to substitute another word that makes sense".  We didn't have time for all the prereading steps before jumping in.

Edited by HomeAgain
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The first basically absorbed it via Sesame Street and Word World. With the second, I used TYCTR 100 Easy Lessons through about lesson 60, switched to Bob books/Abeka early readers/easy Dr Seuss, then went into this year with CLE Learning to Read to learn more "rules" if you will. It was painless because he was very ready and motivated. 

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I have twins. At five, one picked up reading quickly in various ways.

But his brother didn't read until he was seven. He's doing beautifully today so there was zero long-term damage. 😊

I taught him using the I See Sam "books." They're short. (It looks like they're free here. This is news to me.) To me the only downside to printing them out, is that the bought ones come in different colors as you advance in reading. So the first set are on red paper, the second on orange etc.

It was so much fun. My son loved it and responded really well. I saved all the books to hopefully teach grand kids one day! (Okay, I'll be ancient, but I have hope.)

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We are still in the thick of it. For beginning reading I highly recommend Playful Path to Reading - Montessori Homeschool Phonics Program (lisaadele.com). It's more gentle and more exploratory for young readers than Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. You can start with that program before your child knows their letters. After my son started to read with that program I moved to Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and using Waseca readers (my child preferred non-fiction). 

 

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We did 100 Easy Lessons for both kids. Both kids are precocious. 

With DD9, that and some Bob books got her to perfect fluency at 3.5, but symbol decoding is like her superpower -- she currently reads in 3 languages and writes in 2, is the best music theory student her piano teacher's ever had, and is completely fluent in algebra. So generalizing from her is probably a bad idea. 

With DD5, we had to really slow down 100 EZ to make sure it all stuck, and then we did a year's worth of nonsense words to cement lots of phonetic rules. We're taking a break on that -- she's a fluent reader, but her natural bent is not towards phonics, and we'll probably have to come back to phonics for spelling at some point. But after a year's worth of individualized nonsense words, I need a break, and she's reading chapter books at 5, so I figure we've got time 😉 . 

Edited by Not_a_Number
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1 hour ago, Slache said:

This is my issue. He wants school, he wants to learn to read, but I don't think he's there. He's very different than my first two so I'm a little lost.

My third is that way as well. All my kids have fall birthdays so I've always mostly done a grade ahead with them, but child #3 has been a lot slower on the uptake. He'll be 5 soon and white the others were already solidly into OPG, he is just starting to retain the alphabet. That being said, I plan to do the same thing for him as I did for his brothers, just a year later: learn the alphabet, start OPG, mix in bob books, etc.

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We played verbal phonemic awareness games until they could hear beginning and middle sounds and rhyme, then started Explode the Code.  It was great for my boys - literally 5 minutes a day - and they both took off and began reading picture books on their own around book 4.  My daughter is in the thick of it right now and she also loves Explode the Code, but it's a very different experience: rather than knock it out and be done like her brothers, she's all about painstakingly coloring every picture, so her two pages a day is more like 20 minutes by her choice.  

For very first readers, we love Nora Gaydos' Now I'm Reading series - extremely short, phonically controlled, hilarious pictures.  Great for building confidence in that early stage.

After the phonics is done, the other thing that has been magic for us is a @Lori D. suggestion: bedtime here is 7:30, but if you're reading you can stay up later than that.  New readers might only stay up ten minutes, but both my boys regularly read for an hour or more on top of any reading during the day.

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29 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

We did 100 Easy Lessons for both kids. Both kids are precocious. 

With DD9, that and some Bob books got her to perfect fluency at 3.5, but symbol decoding is like her superpower -- she currently reads in 3 languages and writes in 2, is the best music theory student her piano teacher's ever had, and is completely fluent in algebra. So generalizing from her is probably a bad idea. 

Yeah. I have 2 like this, but I call number 3 feral quite often. He's wild and energetic, more of an athlete than an academic. But he wants to read. I feel bad.

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Just now, Slache said:

Yeah. I have 2 like this, but I call number 3 feral quite often. He's wild and energetic, more of an athlete than an academic. But he wants to read. I feel bad.

DD5 actually didn't have the world's easiest time learning to read. She's a tad on the dyslexic side, maybe... I think we spent about 2 months learning to tell b's and d's apart 😕 . But she was very motivated, so we got the hang of it. 

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Just now, Not_a_Number said:

DD5 actually didn't have the world's easiest time learning to read. She's a tad on the dyslexic side, maybe... I think we spent about 2 months learning to tell b's and d's apart 😕 . But she was very motivated, so we got the hang of it. 

I taught her to read early, but I wouldn't have if she hadn't asked and asked -- she wanted to be like her big sister. When we started 100 EZ, she wasn't actually consistently telling letters apart, which was very different from the starting point with DD9. 

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Why is my only answer "Some through the fire, some through the flood"... LOL

No seriously, I taught my dd with a severe application of SWR, which was adequate but left holes (syllabication, etc.). She reads adequately I guess, based on her ACT scores, and she likes books which is a plus. I thought I was good.

Then came ds.

He was reading better than dd at age 6 (technically testing around a 5th/6th gr reading level), but he doesn't touch any book of his own free will. I have clearly failed. 

I keep trying, but I think sometimes kids are who they are. If this is a theoretical dc, you could teach them with almost anything and they'd be fine. However if it's a specific child and there's a family history of issues (dyslexia, APD, ADHD, whatever), then you want to step it up. AAR would be your middle of the road, charming, well organized, likely to work for many kids program. It would hit those kids who need a *bit more* than something like OPGTR. I never even TRIED that, haha, because it was pretty obvious there was dyslexia in my dh's family. To me you look at the situation, kwim? Zero issues in the family, use anything. Some issues, use AAR. More issues, pray hard and do evals first. The Barton screening tool is free and it makes sure the student (at age 5) has the requisite skills to go into an OG based program without preliminary work. Costs nothing, takes 10 minutes.

And yes, a K5er can be screened for dyslexia. There's a CTOPP normed to age 4/5 iirc. There are psychs doing screenings and it's a thing. If there's a family history, definitely screen.

Edited by PeterPan
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I have such a range among my kids. 
 

DD - she sort of intuited it on her own at around age 3 with very (VERY) brief explanation from me. Natural speller. 
 

DS #1 - we used Saxon Phonics K to get the letters figured out and blending, then went to AAR, which he loved. He began reading fluently around AAR3.  Mostly a natural speller, needs to think carefully occasionally to get a correct spelling. 
 

DS #2 - It took him forever to learn the letters (I used Saxon Phonics and then CLE KII). He understood blending very early but the letters and their sounds tripped him up. We tried Dancing Bears, helped a bit. Finally we used AbCeDarian and the I See Sam books and that got him “over the hump”. He’s not perfectly fluent yet but I think he’s about mid 2nd grade level. He will get there. He loves books and reads a lot in his free time, so he’s getting lots of practice. (Handwriting and spelling need work.)

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51 minutes ago, Slache said:

Yeah. I have 2 like this, but I call number 3 feral quite often. He's wild and energetic, more of an athlete than an academic.

If he is neural typical but just less of a sit and learn kid, you can use the same curriculum as your other two. Then adjust the lecture part of the lesson to be shorter (less call and response and just tell him the rule or whatever), then practice the rule, then sporadically point out words throughout the day. 

Buddy reading is great. Really mark up the words he's going to read then you read some (somehow this lessens the overwhelm). Progressive reading did some passages where they have very few words marked up for my son to read and then repeated the passage with more words. This really built up his stamina and confidence to read bigger chunks of words.   

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I'm another case of "100 easy lessons." It worked like magic on my illiterate 5-year old.

1 hour ago, Slache said:

Yeah. I have 2 like this, but I call number 3 feral quite often. He's wild and energetic, more of an athlete than an academic. But he wants to read. I feel bad.

With two older kids I wonder if you've heard of it or used it before? I don't think it only works on geniuses, just the opposite actually it was designed for what Engelmann called "low performers."

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14 minutes ago, UHP said:

I'm another case of "100 easy lessons." It worked like magic on my illiterate 5-year old.

With two older kids I wonder if you've heard of it or used it before? I don't think it only works on geniuses, just the opposite actually it was designed for what Engelmann called "low performers."

Lol! Don't insult my kid! Kidding. I hated the markings. I was going to see if my library had 100EZ, Phonics Pathways and OPGTTR and pick one.

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5 minutes ago, Slache said:

Lol! Don't insult my kid! Kidding. I hated the markings. I was going to see if my library had 100EZ, Phonics Pathways and OPGTTR and pick one.

My kid found 100EZ too fast, lol, so there 😛 . (She wasn't 4 yet, but knowing her at age 5, I would guess the same thing would have happened if she'd been older. She is NOT phonics-oriented.) 

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I started with Webster's Speller (the syllabary) with the oldest. When he got bored with that, I added in Progressive Phonics, which had the benefit of me having to do some of the reading and it involved screen time. He tired of that sometime in the intermediate level, I think. At that point I felt he still needed something, so I tried OPGTR next, because I already had it. It was perfect - the lessons weren't overwhelming to him at all. His reading really took off maybe halfway through it. 

Somewhere in there, DD learned to read. I don't think I officially did many reading/phonics lessons with her. She just listened to big brother's and that was enough.

Kid #3 started with Webster's and Progressive Phonics. When we realized he has dyslexia, we switched to AAR and are making our way through it.

Kid #4 is just starting practice with Webster's. As Kid #5 is only 11 mo, who knows what I'll want to do with him!

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16 minutes ago, Slache said:

Lol! Don't insult my kid! Kidding.

I'm glad I didn't offend you! You are right to kid, I didn't intend to be casually skeptical of anybody's genius.

I think my child is a genius. But I've found that she gets a lot out of material designed for low performers, if I can find the right time to present it to her. I either have a budding theory about this, or I have cognitive dissonance.

18 minutes ago, Slache said:

I hated the markings. I was going to see if my library had 100EZ, Phonics Pathways and OPGTTR and pick one.

It pretty abruptly stops using the weird font for the last 25 lessons, maybe two or three lessons of phasing it out. It was pretty seamless for my kid.

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I taught The Boys to read using 3x5 index cards, a spiral notebook and a pack of sharpie markers. I had a booklet that was essentially a list of words grouped phonetically that I went by for the most part.

I decided the first few words I was going to teach and taught only the letters or letter-combos that were needed for those words.

I used those words to teach blending by writting sounds on cards and moving them closer together as you are orally blending for the child. Physically and orally modeling it over and over and over again. Getting them to do it after you, getting them to do it with you, getting them to do it for you.

Once they could put together 2-sound and 3-sound words in one breath with me -I just made decks and decks of cards to keep working working on it.

If you can blend m/a/p
you can blend qu/i/ck 

I would write down sounds or words on different cards that they could put together or pull apart and swap out. When a card got damaged or eaten--no big deal. Toss it out and make another one. The cards were easy to carry around town, on city busses, etc.

It's easy to put together decks of cards for what you're working on or what they're finding really easy and like to review to feel smart.
You can make more cards to play games. You can take a multisyllable word and put each syllable on a seperate card.

The sharpie is thick enough for fat little kid fingers to trace over too for them to touch/trace as they sound out words.

It was cheap, portable, highly effective and perfect for a couple of hyper, inattentive kids. They'd have never stared at a sheet of paper with words on it, but they'd slap, snatch, jump on, run to, take, show me, or cover various sounds, syllables and words. 

We played a bunch of "games" with the cards.

Once they were comfortable with the words, I'd make a few cards of those words. 

 

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My first we didn't really have to teach. He taught himself the alphabet at around 18 months and took off from there (but he is a very visual spatial kid). With my second, it was such a surprise what a struggle teaching to read could be - it was very slow going with Bob books 5/ 6 y. Then all of a sudden, his reading just took off, and he is now reading in his 3 native languages (in one language still as an early reader, but a fluent and eager reader in the other two) even though we only taught him to read in English. He still has difficulty with spelling at 9, so there may be an issue there.

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We analyzed words while reading together & seeing signs around the community etc.  Youngest began recognizing words and spelling at age 2 or 3, and could recognize enough words at 4 to read various books.  Once she realized she could read, she just kept going.

Oldest had vision issues which delayed her recognizing letters, but after vision therapy, we just kept doing the word analysis as described above.  As she was then in KG, we used phonic readers and went over them a number of times until things clicked, around her 5th birthday.  A few months in, her KG started teaching sight words, so we practiced those at home using flash cards or sticky notes - usually 10 per week.  Then would read together both phonetic storybooks, such as Bob books, and easy sight word books such as those written by Margaret Hillert.  We also watched animated storybooks with subtitles, such as this series.  https://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Treasury-100-Storybook-Classics/dp/B00QKXAX94/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?dchild=1&keywords=dvd+scholastic+treasury+100&qid=1628567988&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&smid=A309ZWTXH9690T&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEzM0hUOFZXUlpVWFNWJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMTk1OTE3WDE1UVNCREdENVVPJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTAwMDAxMTlXODlYQlpHQjNJQVYmd2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGYmYWN0aW9uPWNsaWNrUmVkaXJlY3QmZG9Ob3RMb2dDbGljaz10cnVl

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I would use the I See Sam readers and Blend Phonics cards (use for decoding with games like @Gil explains.)

They are free online with the wayback machine (Developed for US Government, not under copyright)

http://web.archive.org/web/20190329161707/http://www.marriottmd.com/sam/

Don Potter's Blend Phonics cards:

http://www.donpotter.net/pdf/blend_phonics_decoding_card.pdf

More Blend Phonics things:

http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/blend_phonics.html

How to make phonics fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b2HyvcWaZA&t=15s

Game book from LOE, a ton of fun phonics games, can use with any program.

https://store.logicofenglish.com/collections/product-type-supplements/products/game-book

How to teach blending, includes link to little letter sound cards you can use to make it more fun.

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/blendingwords.html

You can do the basics while jumping and running around, a lot of oral spelling, some whiteboard work, run little cars over letters, jump from letter to letter--print them out big, one letter each, on paper, or an alphabet foam mat.

Use talking letter factory DVD for basic sounds if he doesn't know them already, also my chart, color in page 6, drill across and down daily.

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On Reading/Resources/40LChartsCombined.pdf

If the short vowels start to be a slog when you hit blends, you can switch over to long vowels first, the old Open Court, Blue then Gold workbooks, free to print.

http://wigowsky.com/school/opencourt/opencourt.htm

 

Edited by ElizabethB
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I taught all* of my kids to read using the Dick and Jane readers that my MIL gave us.  Once they finished Dick and Jane, I threw a ton of books at them, including some of the Abeka readers.  

One child needed a tiny bit of phonics instruction.  Everyone else just took off with it and figured out the phonics on their own.

 

*I put an asterisk next to all because one of my children taught herself to read.  I had almost no involvement in it.  She is one of the later kids and heard me teaching two or three other siblings how to read and she wanted to join in the fun. :)

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9 hours ago, Slache said:

Lol! Don't insult my kid! Kidding. I hated the markings. I was going to see if my library had 100EZ, Phonics Pathways and OPGTTR and pick one.

The markings drop off in 100ez

My youngest really wanted to learn how to read at age 4.  I actually have a video of him doing one of the short stories on youtube.  You can see there's no cuddling on the couch together. It takes him about 5 seconds before the wiggles get him. 😄

For real, most of reading with this kid was not done from a book.  I ended up making the first 50 lessons into a file of cards, numbered so I knew exactly what NEEDED to be pulled to play with, and then I could pull others for review.  I copied the stories out of the book, too, and then ended up buying the Reading Mastery readers for other kids I taught with the same program.

The cards really helped in the latter part of the book when we could see both styles ("funny font" and the word written regular) and pull to help sticky parts.

Edited by HomeAgain
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In SHORT lessons. Both Phonics Pathways and Logic of English products were helpful. He'd known the letter names since he was a toddler, but he needed time to grow and about 5 minutes  day of direct instruction. He got intimidated when things seemed hard--the LOE jumping from one card to another games were a hit, and I also at times used construction paper to cover up most of the page in Phonics Pathways. He finally read me a book he'd never seen before without help shortly after turning 6, and we went to the library and got him his very own card.

Phonics Pathways is inexpensive and might even be at your library, so I'm always inclined to recommend that first. (100 Easy Lessons was a flop here.)

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With my oldest, I just made it up as I went. We just started with the alphabet, a cheap phonics workbook and lots of reading. She picked it up pretty quickly. I probably pushed too hard. 

My boys, I used a mix of LLATL blue, OPGTR and some LEM phonics. Bouncing between them as needed. Some took longer, all are good readers now. 

I didn't like 100EZ lessons. I know people swear by it, but I got about 15 lessons in and hated the non phonics. 

Edited by LMD
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After the initial understanding of the alphabet and letter sounds we moved on to Bob books (a couple of mine did these in preschool, but for sure in early kindergarten with all of them,) After early sets of Bob books, most of mine were moving on to other books, and we added serious phonics study work in later kindergarten/1st grade.  I used Rod and Staff 1st grade phonics.  We did the reading program too, but this was less to teach reading than to practice it.  The phonics study and just reading of lots of books together after the Bob books and similar library readers is what made them good readers. 

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I spent way too much time and money teaching my son. He started out eagerly and caught on to the letter sounds with ease. Once we hit blending, we were muddled down for at least year. He lost his zest in the process. In the meantime, we were doing loads of read alouds and he was listening to hours worth of audiobooks. All that book enjoyment backfired a bit when he refused to read “baby stories” to practice his reading. 
 

Eventually, I found Pinwheels by Rooted In Language and that was the ticket. I really like the program for DS. It’s lots of fun, systematic, and thorough. I dislike that it’s in a PDF and requires a lot of initIal prep. 

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Leapfrog Letter Factory, 100 easy lessons, BOB readers.

I’m not having much success with youngest boy so far though.  He has vision problems but desperately wants to read.  My gut says he’s just not ready because of other neurological catch-up things going on, but it’s possible there are other learning difficulties too.  He’s faster than other kids to identify cars & ask why questions incessantly though, so I’m not sure.  Listening in for ideas for him. 

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I'm on my third round with I See Sam.  It's worked for my three very different learners.  I do teach all the letter sounds a la Spalding-style programs when they are introduced in the books.  One of my kids went through the first three levels of Sam in 3 months; one took a school year; the current one looks like he'll be through in a total of 4-6 months.

I find after the first three levels they are ready for "real" books, and we move on to spelling for phonics and lots of Elephant and Piggy or Frog and Toad or Henry and Mudge, etc.

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On 8/9/2021 at 5:11 PM, Slache said:

Yeah. I have 2 like this, but I call number 3 feral quite often. He's wild and energetic, more of an athlete than an academic. But he wants to read. I feel bad.

Maybe check into Logic of English Foundations A.  It starts with a lot of phonemic awareness activities and LOE Foundations uses quite a few games that involve movement.  That helped with my kids who needed to move a lot.

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On 8/10/2021 at 12:46 AM, Junie said:

I taught all* of my kids to read using the Dick and Jane readers that my MIL gave us.  Once they finished Dick and Jane, I threw a ton of books at them, including some of the Abeka readers.  

One child needed a tiny bit of phonics instruction.  Everyone else just took off with it and figured out the phonics on their own.

 

*I put an asterisk next to all because one of my children taught herself to read.  I had almost no involvement in it.  She is one of the later kids and heard me teaching two or three other siblings how to read and she wanted to join in the fun. 🙂

For DS I used T4L for phonics and BOB books, plus tons of read aloud and side by side reading.  The thing that really grabbed him, though, was Dick and Jane.  I checked out a Collection book from the library and he was all in.

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21 hours ago, Servant4Christ said:

With Oldest, I used CLE Learn to Read. Thinking of using SWR with Cursive First for the littles, though.

Oldest already knew the alphabet and sounds for each letter including long and short vowels (from watching LeapFrog DVDs) and was reading Bob books before starting CLE. 

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On 8/13/2021 at 11:49 AM, Katy said:

Leapfrog Letter Factory, 100 easy lessons, BOB readers.

I’m not having much success with youngest boy so far though.  He has vision problems but desperately wants to read.  My gut says he’s just not ready because of other neurological catch-up things going on, but it’s possible there are other learning difficulties too.  He’s faster than other kids to identify cars & ask why questions incessantly though, so I’m not sure.  Listening in for ideas for him. 

What's he having trouble with? 

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