Teach Your Child To Read

When you teach your child to read, as you may well be doing at the moment using our free online reading course, you really need to have excellent reading materials at every stage of the game. At the level of a beginner reader obviously the child will not really be able to do much with them. However the familiarity with the reading materials of a high quality will help to get your child used to reading books.

We believe that the best selection of books for the early years reader is provided by Usborne so at “Teach Your Child To Read” we have decided that this is the source of books that we will be recommending. Every now and again we will point out good books to get from Usborne and others if they are good enough to satisfy our demands for quality and price. Over time we will be recommending books by them for our early years readers of course but equally we would like you to browse through the site and make orders based on what your child might well be interested in once they start to read. Every child is different so maybe they have a love of dinosaurs, like my son Dani, or they want to know about flowers, animals or they like fairy stories above anything, Usborne will provide you with great books in these areas.

The Usborne books store is great value but remember you can also become a representative for your local area if you are in Europe so that you get a lot of books for yourself for free for example and make some money. Have a look at the Usborne books site sign up page here.

Related Posts

1) Introduction to Usborne Books

2) Teach Your Child To Read E-Book

3) Elizabeth Pantley Tips on Reading

4) Answers to Some Questions

And it is free. The “Good Start Guide to Reading” is now up and running for those signed up to the newsletter. Great feedback from the people who have already signed up as they were sent the ebook (More of a report) yesterday and many people have been in touch about how clear and concise the information is. A quick six page report in PDF format (If you cannot read PDF’s just send us an email and we will send a Word or Pages version) You too can have it totally free by signing up on the right or the pop up for our free course on teaching your child to read.

So what do you get?

It is a quick start guide to reading of course. It has the top ten tips for a good start to reading. It takes you from the pre-reading stage of phonemic awareness games and activities, through the teaching of phonics and how you do it through to the sight words lists and how to make this more boring part of learning much, much more interesting. Then we have talked about the best ways of teaching as a whole because a sentence is formed by phonetically spelled words, sight words and reading cues such as pictures and context that help you to bring out the abilities of your child to read. It finishes with the top ten tips for a good start to teach your child to read.

If you are at all interested in helping to teach your child then you really should be looking at signing up for the newsletter and following the prograame through. You will not regret it if you do it.

Related Posts

1) Phonemic Awareness Games

2) Sight Words Games

3) Phonics Games and Activities

4) Sign Up Form

Teaching your child to read can be challenging, time-consuming but also rewarding and lots of fun. In order to get your child motivated and ready to learn to read you may need some pointers to get off to that good start. We are writing our ‘Good Start Guide’ to teaching children reading to help you get off to that positive start which will further motivate both you and your child on the journey to literacy. If you have already signed up to receive our free phonics worksheets for our online reading course, you will be sent this guide automatically. If not, sign up now on the pop-up or through the link to the right and you will receive not only this free guide, but also all the resources, links and advice you need to guide you through the whole process of teaching your child to read.

If you would like a quick preview at the kind of resources we provide, just click on this link which takes you to the letter ‘s’ advice, links and activities. It can be found here. Remember it is imperative that you download the fonts beforehand so that everything works perfectly. The download page for the fonts is here. (Please take into account the fonts used are particular ones which are in the style used to teach handwriting. If you do not have these fonts installed you may not see the worksheets exactly as they should appear, but you’ll have an idea as to what they will be like.)

If you have friends and family with children at the same stage, please let them know about us and they too will get the good start guide to teaching your child to read. I’m sure they’ll be happy you have helped them to find a useful and essential helping hand for such an important stage of child development.

We look forward to helping you, your friends and all your children to get reading, so please sign up now!

In order to get you into the swing of what we are offering with our free online reading course for children, I have freed up the password links for the first letter, S. On the three pages which you can find below you will find introductions of how to teach the letter sounds, practice phonics activities and games and a whole lot of links and resources.

S – The First Page

S – The Second Page

S – The Third Part

Firstly, make sure you download the fonts to your computer (You can find them and the instructions for putting them on your computer here.) Then go into the three posts where you can find and download the materials. Once you have them then print them out and get used to using them. Also remember to download the application for the Jolly Phonics Songs and Actions

If you are convinced, and you will be, then sign up for the newsletter and bit by bit you will get the rest of the course at a speed to complement the average child’s development. “Teach Your Child To Read” through me, Lynne, will be here to help guide you through the materials.

*** If You Are Already On The Mailing List Then When You Recieve The Mails For The Letter S They Will Have the Passwords On. They Can Be Ignored For Now But All Future Letters Will Have Individual Passwords and Will Not Be Freed Up. As I Said In Mail Number 9 Download Links Will Be On The Actual Mails As Opposed To Pages. ***

Related Posts

1) Free Phonics Worksheets

2) Using Phonics To Teach Your Child To Read

3) More Common Teaching Reading Terms

Here is some good advice on teaching your child to read from a fantastic author – one of my favourite childcare experts – Elizabeth Pantley. It’s from her book ‘Perfect Parenting: The Dictionary of 1,000 Parenting Tips’.

How do I encourage my child to read?

My child doesn’t like to read, and will only do the bare minimum required to get through his homework. I know that fluency in reading is important to his success in school. How do I encourage him to read more often?

Think about it:

You’re right to be concerned. Reading is the key to success in all school subjects. With a bit of creativity you can help your child enjoy reading more, and spend more time doing it!

Make it fun.

Purchase or borrow a stack of “fun” books. Choose books that will be relatively easy for your child to read, in other words, those that are slightly below his level of reading ability. Choose topics based on your child’s interests: baseball, horses, sleepover parties, wild animals, insects, etc. Pick a mystery, a joke book, books about current movie stars or athletes, even comic books. Don’t comment about the books; simply leave them lying on the table where your child is sure to see them. To become a great reader, a child needs lots of practice. If you can find the types of books your child will be interested in reading, he’ll get the pure practice he needs to make other, more complex, reading easier.

Let him browse the library:

Allow your child to get his own library card. Take him to the library and teach him how to use the computers and the wide variety of resources available. Many libraries offer classes to teach kids how to use the resources. Make a routine visit to the library, and make sure you go when you’re not rushed, so he can take time to explore.

Pick the right computer games:

Take advantage of your child’s love of computer games to purchase those that require a lot of reading to play the game. Avoid those that are simply computerized video games.

Encourage bed-time reading:

Buy your child a bedside reading lamp, or a tiny book light. Tell him that from now on, he must be in bed by a specific time (say 8:30) and that he can either sleep or read. Most kids will do anything rather than go to sleep, so there’s a chance you’ll create a new bedtime reading habit.

Have reading material available.

Many children will read when they are sitting alone having a snack, or if they have a few minutes of unplanned free time. Put a box of books and magazines near the kitchen table so that reading material is accessible.

Read to your child.

Often, once children learn to read independently, parents stop reading to them. This change of routine causes great sadness to a child who has come to love falling asleep as you read. Even a teenager will enjoy being read to if you pick books that pique his interest. Select books together, and make sure they’re ones you enjoy as well, so your enjoyment will come through as you read to them.

Check it out.

Some children don’t like to read because they have poor eyesight or an undetected learning disability. Look for signs that there is a problem. Does your child rub his eyes after reading? Complain of a headache? Become easily frustrated or angry while trying to read? If you notice any of these problems, make an appointment with your pediatrician to have your child’s health checked out, or with an optometrist for a complete eye exam.

Excerpted with permission by McGraw-Hill Publishing from Perfect Parenting (McGraw-Hill 1998).

Extra Reading

http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/?p=395

http://www.bookpassage.com/blog/?p=388 A lovely story about reading in a book store.

We have been threatening to put the links page of “Teach Your Child To Read” up for a couple of weeks now and finally we have compiled what we consider to be a pretty definitive list of resources to help you in your search for things to do with your child to help them to read. More will come as we discover them of course. Remember though to bookmark this site and keep referring back because we will be explaining how all of this information knits together in order to make the best progress with your child when reading. To see the links page use the navigation tabs at the top of the page. It is next to the contact us button.

Sign up for our newsletter or use the RSS reader on the right (You know, the one with the little orange man with a newspaper who looks like he is using the toilet) to keep in touch. Our newsletter sign ups in the first week have exceeded expectations and the feedback from those who have signed up has been brilliant, thanks for that.

Some Fonts

After some interesting queries I decided to write a new blog post to answer, so other people get to see the answer too.

Regarding what age to start – that’s a difficult one! The phonemic awareness games and activities can be started as young as 2 and definitely by 3. They involve purely auditory skills and can be as basic as listening to and identifying environmental sounds, or as complex as generating rhyming strings of words. If your child cannot identify rhyme yet (some children do not acquire this skill until they are 6 or older), read lots of nursery rhymes and rhyming stories, and when they are familiar with them, leave out the second of each rhyming pair of words. All these games help to prepare them for future reading and writing.

Learning the actual letter sounds through phonics instruction can start whenever your child shows interest, and the later you start, usually the quicker they progress as they are more mature and able to remember and concentrate more. I would suggest between 4 and 5, when you can see your child is keen and motivated to learn. Pushing too far too quick usually causes children to slam their own brakes on the learning process. Some children are ready at this age to learn the letter sounds very quickly, various letters each day; others will struggle to remember any letters at one each week. You can still carry on with the activities as long as your child does not feel pressured, discouraged or lose confidence because of this, remember the activities and songs can be repeated week after week for the same letters as well as introducing new ones. Your attitude to their successes and failures sets the scene for them feeling confident and happy or dejected, so especially at this early stage forget your expectations and praise, praise, praise.

Regarding the font used, this is one which is like the handwriting style often taught in the British and American systems, but not in the Spanish system. In the Spanish system the main differences are the letters ‘b’, ‘r’, ‘s’ and ‘z’, and the fact that their letters are generally ‘more cursive’ than this font! Their letters are normally taught with the entrant stroke to the letter already joined as well as the exit ‘flick’. Here are some fonts I have found which are similar to the style of handwriting used in Spanish schools, and as all the worksheets I have produced are in Word format, you could change the font to one of these if you like.

Brush script:
Script MT bold:
French script:
Vladimir Script :

The French script looks to me like the easiest to read, though it does look to me to be even more cursive than the normal handwriting. I am not aware of any particular font which is the same as the handwriting taught in Spain, but I will do a bit of investigation and get back to you on this if I find one! (Just found one which is similar: try searching for Cursive Handwriting at www.fontstock.net – it gives you a trial of a good one.)

Depending on how old your child is and how much they have already been taught, you could just explain that in your country they write some letters differently and ask how does your teacher write this letter? Then when there is one which is different, ask them to choose which way they would like to practise writing it, or practise both ways. For reading, they will have to learn to recognise a variety of different fonts in different books and texts, so learning to recognise letters using a different font is no problem.

Regarding the question about handwriting or neatness, when children are starting to write, their handwriting ability varies very greatly depending on how their fine motor skills are developing. In general they will try to write carefully, but if they don’t, it’s usually because they can’t! To develop good handwriting, they need to have good fine motor skills which are developed by using the muscles in the hands and fingers. You shouldn’t criticise handwriting, but you can make suggestions such as “Try to remember to keep the letters sitting on the line and not floating in the air – they might escape!” and “If you start at this side of the page, and write small letters, you’ll be able to fit your writing on the page better.”  Then to improve handwriting you can do activities which develop these muscles and fine motor skills. Examples are modelling with play dough and plasticine, tearing paper, rolling small pieces of paper into little balls… (Good idea for another post or link for more ideas – I’ll look into it!) In Spain, handwriting is considered an important skill – even more so than in our system, and so they practise much more and in the end have much neater handwriting than a lot of our students!

Hope this helps, any more questions, please feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Related Posts;

1) Welcome to Teach Your Child To Read

2) Fonts For Our Free Phonics Worksheets

3) Sign Up Form (For The Free Worksheets)

One of the major areas in which we are looking to be useful here at “Teach Your Child to Read” is the expat market. Many expats send their children to international schools and nurseries/kindergartens but there are many who don’t. They want their children to fit into the local culture and the first and most obvious step is to go to the local schools in the local language.

This leaves them with a quandary of course because they don’t want their child to “fall behind” other children of their age in case they move back to their home country or onto another country where English is the lingua franca.

Here is where this website can help you so much. The clear instructions from “Teach Your Child to Read” on our Phonics Reading Course will help you to help teach your child to read. There are two main areas of the online reading course, the phonics instruction, how to teach using the resources we provide, and the links to other resources that complement our approach and provide a solid grounding in teaching children reading.

There is no doubt there are thousands of places and resources both on and offline that you can find to help you teach your child to read. However many of them are at best just a diversion. We have sifted through to find the best links, check out our links page when it goes live later this week, the best resources, our own and recommended resources, and the clearest instructions for using those resources so that you as a parent, and teacher in this case, feel comfortable and confident in what you are teaching your child.

Have no doubts that this online course in teaching reading through phonics, sight words lists and phonemic awareness activities along with the backup and the forum which will be up soon is the perfect start for your child’s reading journey.

Follow our course for free through the autoresponder or order it online and you give your child the advantages in and out of the classroom that you could not imagine having done before. (And remember to tell your friends too)