Delightful Reading for the Beginner

Reading is a big deal in education and it is important but don't let it stress you out.  When children are learning to read it can be slow or it can be fast.  If your child isn't reading novels by the time they are 9 that is OKAY.  It took me a while to accept this and the best way to describe it is learning to walk.  When your child was a baby you noticed either they were walking at 8 months - 1 year, some less and others over a year, within a few weeks they went from toddling to all out running.  My son was around 16 months before he could walk.  I couldn't force him to walk at any particular month or day.  It is all part of when they are developmentally ready it will happen. Same with reading, they are going to "toddle" with the sounds of letters, words, sentences then soon they will be running with paragraphs. I have seen this over a my 10+ years of teaching from 1st-6th graders in school settings.

There are mainly two different ways to teach reading sounds and words. One is phonics which long story short, learning individual sounds and lots of phonic rules.  The other is whole language, looking at a word and hearing it read and knowing it when you see it.  I don't think that either one on its own is the perfect way to teach reading, especially using the English language.  There are so many "exceptions" to the rules in phonics and whole language takes care of that problem.  Take the two and mix it together and it might be the best way.  I found this works best with our son and he seems to be doing much better using this kind of method.  This is also a Charlotte Mason method approach to reading.  I also have thrown in my own knowledge which you will see in the video, of using colors to help the mind separate out the sounds. 

I wrote out the main sound we were working on in one color.

Then I said the sound I needed him to write.

He now has the whole word together and he read the word.

Also using the Charlotte Mason method means we use virtually no textbooks. So the reading lessons are from real books and literature. Our first lesson was the poem Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson and now we are using an Aesop Fable.  Many sentences and words can be taken just from those two passages.  

I bought the Delightful Reading set from Simply Charlotte Mason website and in this set you get a teacher book which is very easy to follow, letter tiles, words tiles, word notebook, cd's to print extra words and more.  I have enjoyed using this set and each lesson follows a pattern so your child will pick up on this very quickly so it leaves their mind open to grasp the reading concept and not trying to figure out what will happen next.