Real Life Homeschool: Teaching Your Child to Read

I have talked to many mom's that want to homeschool but feel inadequate to help their children thrive during their structured education years. I know how that feels because there are many moment in time where I question myself. So what I have come to believe is that if you teach your child to read and read well then they can learn anything! But how do you teach your child to read? Good question. I was thinking the same thing when Monkey was about 3 years old and I was dreading him getting to kindergarten age.

Lucky for me I met another homeschooling mom that told me about Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons! This book is amazingly easy to use. It has everything right there for you to read and then for your child to read. The first lessons start out slow and work there way up. But they work up pretty quickly but Monkey was pretty quick to catch on.

But this doesn't always mean that when you start things will be smooth sailing. For us we had to try several different things to get this book started. Monkey got so overwhelmed by the amount of writing that he couldn't understand what to do and he would completely melt down. I knew I didn't just want to toss the book and try something else completely different so I needed to find a way to still use the book but make it less threatening in my little guys view. So I made flash cards. I would go through the lesson that we were going to do the next day and make flash cards with the letters he was to learn and the words he was going to read that day with the dots and lines just like the book. We did this for probably 15 lessons. Once the stories started to get longer I started just doing the flash cards for the letters and had him read the story in the book. Shortly after that he was fine using the book without the flash cards. It was a great day when that happened.

We are currently on Lesson 52. We've been working on it since late September but I'm not to much in a rush. Life is a little crazy around here so since he's so young we do school when we can and sometimes it gets pushed to the side for a week. And that's ok. It's homeschooling it comes with flexibility!

We also add to the lessons. Now that he's able to read beginning reader books we stock up on those while at the library. He reads to me, Goose, Daddy, and Grandma and Popa over skype. It's a great bonding time for all us and he's getting real practice reading real books. He started feeling like the lesson book was taking forever to get through, and it kind of is with all the days off he gets, and it was making him feel like he was never going to be able to read a book. So in order to build his confidence I got some really easy books I knew he could read and showed him that he can read real books and before long he'll be reading harder and harder books. It was a real motivator.

How ever you decide your child is going to learn to read, whether at home or in a school setting remember to always keep reading as a fun activity as much as possible. Help your child to love reading and they will have a life long skill that will make it possible to learn anything!

Some beginning books suggestions that I love are Bob Books and We Both Read. I'm very lucky that our library here in OK carries them both. In CO they only carried We Both Read another bonus to us moving.

And look what you can find when you search the internet! Even a YouTube video that shows you an example! So check out how a lesson works with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons! This is a great example of how Monkey behaves during a lesson too!