Welcome to “Teach Your Child To Read”

“Teach Your Child to Read” is a new site which will explain the best learning techniques, games, methods and products including phonics, ideas to increase phonemic awareness, how to use sight words and sight words lists and more. Everything you need to help your child develop their reading skills and to help you to help them. (Which means you get to spend time together too!). The pages are organised so that you can find specific sight words games and activities, phonics games and phonemic awareness activities which will all encourage you and your child as you teach your child to read.

Teach Your Child To Read

NEW: SIGN UP TO RECEIVE OUR FREE WORKSHEETS AND TIPS TO THE RIGHT ———–>

I’m Lynne, a busy teacher and mother of three. Whenever I can I’ll be adding to the “Teach Your Child To Read” site with new articles, tips and ideas about helping your child to read and write. Please bookmark the site and keep visiting to see all the new things here or follow using the RSS reader to the right. In the future I’m hoping to put up a forum where parents can ask me or each other questions, make suggestions, review products etc., where we can help and support each other on the journey to bringing up literate children and eager readers.

Remember – click on the Categories tab on the right to find what you are looking for if you get stuck!

We look forward to seeing you here regularly and just to start to teach your child to read straight away get these sight words cards and phonics games in “The Reading Lesson”.

And remember to share this site with others using the Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and other icons below thanks

Lynne

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

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!

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)

I am recommending one letter per week in the non-alphabetical order described in the phonics section of the site, and have included many different activities to do with each letter so you can take your child from the most basic level of understanding up to decoding simple phonetic words and phrases in no time at all. I have scoured the web for the best resources over the years as a teacher and parent, and will also include links to relevant and useful resources taking the pain out of the search and allowing you to concentrate your efforts on teaching your child to read doing what really works.

Meanwhile, if you feel your child is ready for a faster pace of learning the letter sounds and want to get the whole course upfront rather than waiting on a week by week basis, then we will be making it available for you in that way too. To register an interest simply send an email to lynne@teachyourchildtoread.net and we will mail you when it is up and ready and give you details of how to get it.

I hope the theory I have explained in the other pages here will help you understand how you can help at home and inspire you to take the first positive step to helping your child get a head start in the fun and rewarding process of learning to read.

Time for some activities with sight words and sight words lists so that you get an idea of how you can use them. A few games today and more to follow in the next post. Remember that the sight words are a hugely important part when you are helping to teach your child to read so enjoy using them with your children.

Remember to only play with two or three
unfamiliar words at a time in order to reduce the frustration level!

• Make cards with the sight words on, with two of each word and play Snap. Start with just two or three unfamiliar words and add to them when these are memorised. Remember to say the word out loud when you put the card down.
• With the same cards, play Memo, or Memory game where you place cards upside down so you can’t see them and try to find the pairs of words, saying the words as you turn them over.
• Starfall has a good online sight word memo game here http://www.starfall.com/n/matching/sight-words/load.htm
• Play Hangman using sight words, pointing out how many letters are in the word. You can also look at if it has tall or short letters in it, instead of just drawing a line for each letter, draw a box which needs to be the correct size for the letter (a tall box for l, t, d etc.; a box which descends downwards for g, j etc., a small box for a, c, e etc.)

Remember to pick up a great set of Key Words Flash Cards Here

A Starting Point For Learning Sight Words

Sight word lists are important when you start to teach your child to read. They give you, as the “teacher”, a good idea  of the main words your child needs to learn as sight words and also give you an idea of the sight word flashcards you can look for to buy, make or download to work with your child.

There are many sight word lists including the Dolch sight words (used primarily in the States) and also the lists published by the Department of Education in the UK. The list below is a good starting point for teaching your child to read sight words because it has the hundred most common words used in children’s books. Knowing these words, along with being able to read phonetically spelled words using phonics, will help to make your child’s reading more fluent, helping them to enjoy what they are reading more.

The first 100 most important sight words according to the UK government’s Letters and Sounds document are the following:

1. the

2. and

3. a

4. to

5. said

6. in

7. he

8. I

9. of

10. it

11. was

12. you

13. they

14. on

15. she

16. is

17. for

18. at

19. his

20. but

21. that

22. with

23. all

24. we

25. can

26. are

27. up

28. had

29. my

30. her

31. what

32. there

33. out

34. this

35. have

36. went

37. be

38. like

39. some

40. so

41. not

42. then

43. were

44. go

45. little

46. as

47. no

48. mum

49. one

50. them

51. do

52. me

53. down

54. dad

55. big

56. when

57. it’s

58. see

59. looked

60. very

61. look

62. don’t

63. come

64. will

65. into

66. back

67. from

68. children

69. him

70. Mr

71. get

72. just

73. now

74. came

75. oh

76. about

77. got

78. their

79. people

80. your

81. put

82. could

83. house

84. old

85. too

86. by

87. day

88. made

89. time

90. I’m

91. if

92. help

93. Mrs

94. called

95. here

96. off

97. asked

98. saw

99. make

100. an

Sorry to repeat, but this bit is important! Knowing these words as sight words will make children a lot more fluent and confident in their reading. When you combine these words with a knowledge of phonics, then their reading fluency will increase and their comprehension and enjoyment of reading will also increase accordingly.

If you need a pack of sight words flash cards then click below to get started.

Key Words Flash Cards: Key Words Flash Cards (Key Words Reading Scheme)

US Sight Words Flash Cards

Synthetic phonics is a popular system used to teach phonics to children. One of the best-known schemes used in schools to teach synthetic phonics is Jolly Phonics. It involves looking at each letter or grapheme within the written word, associating these to the sounds they represent and then learning to blend those sounds together in order to read the word. They also need phonemic awareness in order to identify the phomenes or sounds in spoken words and then know which letter or group of letters is used to represent these sounds in order to write the word. The UK government has produced their own ‘scheme’ which can be taught using a commercially published scheme or by making your own resources but which is now taught in all UK schools. This is called ‘Letters and Sounds’.  This is quite a long and complicated document aimed at teachers, but I use and explain various ideas from it in other sections of this site where I give ideas of how to help at home with reading, so don’t worry if you haven’t got the time to sift through it all!

Analytical phonics teaches children by analyzing and comparing words with identical sounds and they work out how each sound is represented by a letter or group of letters (for example loud, cloud, sound). The individual graphemes are not taught separately, but are identified within words. The focus is not on learning how to blend sounds and some blends (for example ‘sl’ and ‘st’) are looked at as a whole rather than as individual phonemes which are then blended together.

Embedded phonics is used in ‘whole language programs’, where the focus is on learning meaning through reading ‘real’ books.  Phonics are not taught as a separate or individual lesson, but are taught opportunistically as and when the need arises when reading.

Cues are the things which help people read. There are various cues that help:
•    Phonics cues – knowing the letters and the sounds they make help you to work out what the word might say even if it is one you’ve not seen before.
•    Picture cues – looking at the pictures can help children guess at a word they don’t know.
•    Semantics cues – using the context and meaning of the sentence helps children to decide what word is likely to come next and if their guess based on phonics is likely to be correct.
•    Syntactic cues – children without realising it know about grammar and what word would fit in to a sentence and make sense, sounding like real language.

In order to become fluent readers, children need to learn to use all of these cues to help them read.