How to Teach Your Child to Read

How to Teach Your Child to Read

(Please note that this post includes affiliate links. They’re boring, but you can read my full disclosures here if you want.)

How do I teach my child to read? I asked that very question 16 years ago when my oldest was four-years-old. She was nearly five, but she would miss the kindergarten deadline by about six weeks. Despite my pleading, frantic phone calls, they weren’t budging.

My daughter wouldn’t be able to go off to kindergarten with all of her little friends in the neighborhood. She was devastated! The only way I could console her was to promise that we would have our own FUN school at home.

Oops! I had a new baby, a 1-year-old, a 3-yr old and a 4-year-old. I was up to my eyeballs in diapers and breastfeeding! Plus, I didn’t even know where to start.

Teaching my daughter to read felt overwhelming.  After all, reading is probably the single most important skill you’ll ever teach your kids. What if I messed it up?

I honestly didn’t know where to start. Luckily, my mother-in-law, Lynette, was a teacher. I still chuckle over our initial conversations, though. Lynette had to explain every single term to me.

I’m plenty smart. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But terms like digraphs, phonemes and metacognitive meant nothing to me. The terminology was so different, it felt like learning a foreign language.

The internet was no help back in 2002, either.

How would I know if my daughter was ready to read?

At what age should a child read fluently?

What would I teach her first?

And what in the world came next?

I was completely overwhelmed.

So our first foray into reading was probably much less organized than it should have been, ha, ha! But that daughter is now 21, on full scholarship at a prestigious university. She was homeschooled exclusively all the way through college.

As I’ve taught my subsequent children to read (I recently taught my 8th child!) I’ve learned how EASY and FUN teaching a child to read can actually be.

That’s right, I said easy and fun!

Teaching my children to read quickly became my very favorite part of homeschooling!

Despite having zero experience, zero professional training, and zero education about the process, my children all read beautifully and are very academically successful.

As you read through this series, you will learn the signs of reading readiness, reading readiness activities, fun ways to teach reading strategies, how to teach reading skills, and basically all about how to teach your child to read.

I want you to have all the skills and knowledge (and fun!) that I’ve learned over the last 16 years of teaching my children to read, but wish I had known upfront. The ten articles below will help you to understand how to teach your child to read, and to have fun doing it!

 

 

 

 

 

How to Teach your Child to Read

  1. Is my Child Ready to Read?
  2. Games that Teach Alphabet Letters
  3. Ultimate Guide to Phonics
  4. 10 Easy Ways to Help Children Develop Reading Fluency
  5. 5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Child’s Reading Comprehension
  6. 25 Fun Reading Activities for Kids
  7. How to Integrate Reading and Writing 
  8. How to Establish a Reading Culture in Your Home
  9. How to Help a Struggling Reader
  10. How can Something as Simple as Reading Aloud be so Powerful?

 

If you’re currently working to teach your child to read, you’ll want to pin this series of articles so you can easily come back and refer to it again and again, as often as you need to.

Pin me for later!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to the tips, encouragement and resources that I’ve shared to help your teach your child to read, I’ve joined an amazing group of talented bloggers who have each created their own 10-day helpful homeschooling series for you to enjoy! Be sure to visit them all below!

 

 

 

 

 

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