Teach Your Child to Read at Home

It’s time to teach my child to read! It is a big undertaking, but I feel ready now that I have this list of resources to help me on my journey. If you are looking for ideas on how to begin and what to use, this will be a huge help!

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I have decided to get more structured with teaching Evan letter sounds and progressing towards teaching him to read. In my quest to do this, I have done a TON of research into programs that will help me carry this out. Since I am a blogger, the first thing I did was turn to my fellow kid bloggers to see what they had to offer in this area. I scoured all over and read a ridiculous amount of blog posts, but I am so happy I did because I have found some awesome reading programs that can be printed out and used easily at home. On top of that, they are free or very affordable. I am so excited to share them with you today. I am hoping they will be a great resource to you in your quest to educate your child!

First, I want to share two very informative posts on how to teach your child to read. If you feel lost about where to begin and how to make it all happen, I highly recommend you read these.

How Do I Teach My Child to Read? by Carisa at 1+1+1=1

Tips for Teaching Letters and Letter Sounds by at Becky at This Reading Mama

 

If your child still needs to work on learning letter sounds, this free curriculum called Learning the Alphabet from This Reading Mama is a great place to start. It is fun and playful and will hold the attention of young preschool learners. We plan on using this, printables from other bloggers and continuing the play-based learning activities we’ve been doing to review and reinforce letter recognition and letter sounds before beginning the programs below.

Once your child knows the letters and their sounds, you can begin a program that will help you teach your child to read. I really like Reading the Alphabet from This Reading Mama. It is still fun and playful while at the same time teaching phonics, sight words and more! Plus, it is completely free! It looks awesome and I am really looking forward to using it.

If you plan on using this curriculum, you will want to check out these phonics books from The Measured Mom. They were made to use alongside the Reading the Alphabet curriculum.

I also came across this fantastic program designed by Carisa at 1+1+1=1 called You Can Read!. It focuses on teaching sight words in a way that will be interesting and enjoyable for young children. I plan to use this with Reading the Alphabet. They don’t match up completely, but I plan to piece them together as much as possible.

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In addition, I plan on using BOB Books to facilitate the whole process. The BOB Books are not free, but they are very reasonably priced. I think they will be a great way to help Evan actually read the sounds and sight words he is learning while using the programs above.

These free BOB books printables from 3 Dinosaurs are wonderful and are a great hands-on way to work out the lessons taught in the BOB Books.

This Reading Mama also has a ton of printables to go along with the BOB Books. They look so fun!

We will also use Starfall.com. I really love it so far. We have tried many online reading programs and Evan likes this one the best. Most of the lessons are free if you use your laptop or computer. However, I prefer to let Evan use our Kindle, so I am paying $35 per year for the membership since it gives us access to the lessons via their app on Kindle. The membership also opens up some additional lessons. From what I hear though, the free content is plenty for kids at this level. So if you don’t mind doing these on your desktop or laptop computer, the free version should be enough for you.

                                        

We will also continue to use Leapfrog Letter Factory. Evan loves it and it really is effective. We are just about to begin Talking Words Factory. After that we will use Leapfrog: Word Caper.

I will also integrate more learning apps on our Kindle. I plan to do a post on that in the near future, so stay tuned for that if you have a Kindle.

I still plan on continuing to develop and use many play-based learning activities to teach and reinforce these reading skills as well. I have lots of fun and exciting learning games and activities coming up. I even plan on adapting many of the lessons from the programs above so that Evan still has plenty of chances to move and learn!

I’ve listed a lot here, but plan to pick and choose a little bit of each thing and adjust as we go along. If this seems overwhelming to you, I would love to have you follow along. I plan to blog about what we do each week and how it all comes together. I hope to make it a resource that you can easily follow and implement with your child.

If you would like to stay up to date with what we are doing, I highly recommend signing up for my email newsletter. I send an email out about once a week. In addition, I would love for you to share what you are doing with your kids in the comments here on the blog and also on social media. I hope we can be an encouragement to each other!