Raahub Yasar (Greetings Family),
Today I wanted to share with you what we did with our children to teach them how to read as a sister asked us the other day.
Our oldest Mut Tiy En Re who's 7yrs can read pretty much fluently, our 5 yr old Sakhamtet is beginning to read much more confidently and knows many words though is not as fluent as her older sister and our 3 year old is just learning the sounds and can recognize about 10 now.
When our oldest was about 2 yrs and I was still researching stuff, a sister whose daughter was about 5 yrs old and a good reader for her age, told me that her daughter's nursery used a reading system called Jolly Phonics, so she bought the DVD that came with the system. Once a day, she'd sit her daughter in front of it for 30 mins, which along with reading to her often, resulted in her being so good at reading that she surpassed all the other children in her class. (The nursery then stopped giving her reading homework a few months before the end of the school year and told her that if she kept reading she'd be in danger of stepping on the toes of the work she'd be doing in her next school year, another reason I don't like the school system, this clearly gifted child was kept back from reading more so she'd stay at the same level as the other, less advanced children in her class)
When I went online to find the DVD, I came across the entire teaching school pack that a school would buy to teach the children with. I figured that this would be much more comprehensive than just the DVD (and she wouldn't be going to school or nursery) so we got that instead.
In my opinion, it was excellent, easily laid out and a simple system to follow that was fun for her to learn from.
The teachers set is about £150 and available from - http://www.primaryclassroomresources.co.uk/teaching-resources/Jolly-Phonics-Starter-Kit_JL938.html
I've heard of other good learning systems like Explode The Code that are available in the US that you can try too.
From a very young age, all the children have had a love of reading and we'd read them at least 7-8 books a day, many of them they want us to read twice or more. As they get older, they want to pretend read the books themselves and then when they learn the letter sounds, we encourage them to read as many words in the stories as they can until they can read them much more independently.
We have stacks of books so they don't get bored of reading the same ones all the time and there's a post coming soon showing where we get all our book from (note: only about 10% of our books are bought brand new)
Apart from following the Jolly Phonics systems, the other things that really helped them learn to read were daily repetition of their letter sounds, bright visually beautiful and fun posters and flashcards, reading and phonics workbooks that your child works through, daily reading and lots and lots of positive encouragement.
We also used a online learning program called Time 4 Learning which has lots of reading practice and sound recognition in there also.
Here's a snipet from the Jolly Phonics dvd we have, it's very olde English, but the children like it!
I can't stress how much positive encouragement and daily reading help the learning process of learning, so if nothing else, I'd recommend this.
Hatep Yasar
Mut
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