How do you start teaching a LO to read? My 4.5 year old got some Bob books for Christmas, and shows a lot of interest in wanted to read words (she is always asking how to spell things), but I have no idea where to begin. I don't want it to be too formal, but would love to start teaching her the basics in a fun way.
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We started with more site words and then talked about how to sound them out. We would do a few similar sounding words at once.
CAT
BAT
MAT -
My DD was given a book to practice using sounds -
example:
A a apple ahhh
B b ball buhso when she sees BALL she says Buh ah lllll - ball!
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Friends who aren't teachers have asked me how to teach their kids to read...I usually suggest first letter knowledge (can they identify all their letters?) then work on letter sounds. Once they have a firm understanding of letter sounds/recognition (you wouldn't have to drill and kill, there are so many fun ways to help them master sounds/letters), I recommend high frequency words in books.
Most people have Dr. Seuss books and these are the best for recognizing high-frequency words in print (I, see, can, my, he, the, she, etc). If they can start to recognize high-frequency words with some or little help, you'd be surprised at how their reading can take off without formal "teaching."
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@Mamaof2: what book is it?
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Put words all over your house on things so she can start connecting words with meaning (so she can read the word television because she knows it means television, even though shes not actually sounding out the word) . and you can play dome fun games with sight words and practice reading books with those words.
I am actually working in a blog post about this! stay tuned
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@Bao: it was printed off the computer - I'm guessing you could google one and do it yourself
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Montessori sound games are extremely helpful and you can play in the car or wherever too so it's low stress. The idea is basically I spy but you use the sound so "I spy something that starts with /m/" using the sound not the name. You extend this to middle and end sounds too so "I spy something that has the sound /d/ in it" and the answer might be "daddy."
As they get the hang of it the progression in Montessori is to introduce sand paper letters and small objects to match the sounds. The sandpaper letters are introduced in groups of a few consonants and a vowel because pretty quickly thereafter they start "writing." Montessori isolates the difficulty so they are only working on one challenging skill at once so they write with small alphabet pieces instead of paper and pencil since handwriting is still usually hard. Essentially, they learn to write and then read their own writing this way.
If nothing else though the sound game is a really great way to start.
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We started with practicing letter sounds (teach the names along with them, but focus on the sounds), and began with the short vowel sounds. We mostly used magnetic letters to do this, but puzzles, alphabet books, etc. would work too. Once he had all of those down, we started with a book called The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I'll say upfront that I didn't use it the way it's scripted and don't think it qualifies as particularly "fun" (but then again, most of the Bob books don't either IMO...), but it does at least lay out the basics in a reasonable and efficient way. I disliked the first lessons on the alphabet, so we skipped those and did our own thing. Another book that I looked at that seemed to have a reasonable progression was Phonics Pathways. The Bob books are phonetic like those two books, so I used those as supplements when they fit in with our other lessons.
As far as making things fun, I feel like reading is its own reward (and I made sure that he always considered it to be fun by doing a lot of it and finding fun stuff to read), so I didn't really use games and such to teach the mechanics. When he mastered the letter sounds, we went straight to sounding out words on a page and things have moved along really well. He found excitement in being able to actually read words in some of his favorite books.
If your daughter wants things spelled for her, I'd either use magnets or get a white board, or both. We've got both and we use them all the time for things like that.
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Practicing letter sounds is a good start, and we are starting to let him do some spelling using word on our computers. So we'll ask him to spell "daddy," and ask him what daddy starts with. Then we ask him what makes the "ah" sound in daddy. He started to get that pretty quickly, and it's fun for him to type the letters and then see as they appear. He then recognizes that he typed daddy and understands where it came from.
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I was not successful at all, so don't despair if you can't make progress. My son went from 0 to 60 after just 40 days in kindergarten.
I tried to begin with sight words, I made Flashcards, bought a Pop for sight words game, no dice.
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Rhyming, and pointing to each word while reading to LO really helped! I love Dr. Suess for the repetitiveness and rhyming, it makes it so fun to read and the words are repetitive and recognizable to a child. GOod luck!!
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@Cole: yes writing before reading! my son loves the movable alphabet. It makes it easier to "write" words and transfer to paper.
As they associate sounds with the letters, they'll begin to see words and sound them out as when they sound out with writing/spelling first.
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