Teach Reading the Simple Way

I thought it would be so hard to teach reading. I mean, how does one actually do it? I admit, I even entertained the idea of sending my kids to school for the first few years and then homeschooling after they already knew how to read.

Thankfully, even though we did send our daughter to school for kindergarten she learned to read at home, making me realize how simple it really can be. (Although simple does not always mean easy.)

Reading, just like potty training isn’t a one-size-fits-all job, what works perfectly for some kids will be the dread of the next. I wanted to share how I taught my daughter to read, not because I think this is the way that everyone should do it (or even how I’ll do it when my son is older), but just to throw this out there as an option for those who are looking for one.

Finding a basic text to work off of for teaching reading was an easy choice for me, a number of the mom’s I followed on social media used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and the fact that it was only about $15 had me sold.

TYCTR has such an easy to follow format for everyone. They give you the exact script to read to your children and help you teach them every step of the way.

When looking up some reviews on TYCTR I kept reading two main complaints, both of them are fairly minor but I’ll share them and how we got over them:

IT WAS TOO REPETITIVE

This is a totally justified response but repetition is also what helps it to stick in a child’s mind. If I found certain sounds or words being repeated too often after my daughter already knew them, we would skip those particular words or sounds for awhile. Sometimes we wouldn’t go over the entire set of words to sound out, we did what we could do learn the new content and have it stick without feeling overwhelmed or bogged down.

THE WRITING ASPECT WAS TOO DIFFICULT

The truth is, often kids will be able to sound out letters before they are able to print them properly, we always skipped the entire printing part of the lesson, printing was something we worked on completely aside from reading. That way it kept the lessons shorter and less frustrating.

HOW IT LOOKED FOR US

FOLLOWING THE SCRIPT

So other than skipping the writing and not always reading the full lesson we started to follow the Teach Your Child to Read book. I love that it came with a script so I had no planning to do whatsoever other than just decide how often we would do lessons.

SUPPLEMENTING WITH EXTRA READERS

Once we were a ways into our lessons we started supplementing with some extra reading. We used the Usborne First Reading box set, we have the 16 book set but there is also now a 50 book set. The first books in both sets are unique in the fact that the adult reads one page and the new reader reads the other side, that way you still can still be reading a good story and have the child’s part limited to the sounds and words they know.

ADJUSTING IT TO FIT OUR NEEDS

Then once we were at about lesson 80 we were feeling quite done with the book, so we did a few lessons a day, just reading the story at the end and if there was a new sound blend we quickly went over that. And just kept supplementing with other easy readers (I’m in the middle of working on a book list of our favorite easy readers).

All in all, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons took a job that I thought nearly impossible to one that was really quite simple, it’s definitely a book I’d recommend to anyone looking for an inexpensive and easy resource for their family.

Note: Because I am sure some are curious, I started to use TYCTR when my daughter was about 4 and we went through lessons very slowly and finished the book a few months after she turned 5. If I remember correctly the book says you can start with an advanced 4 year old or the average 5 year old. I liked how we could progress at our own pace, there were weeks where my daughter hit a wall and we didn’t do any lessons and then there were times where she was getting it and we did a few a week. In the end we were doing a few lessons a week consistently. The nice thing is, you can totally customize your schedule for your family.

What are some methods you’ve used to teach reading?