Our
educational plan for Kindergarten includes using readers for Grades 2 and 3. Am I a bit over ambitious? No. It's where he is, so that's where we are. As of this post, he's actually already finished the 2nd grade readers and is in the second of the 3rd grade readers. We might actually be using the 4th or 5th grade readers before the end of this year!
With links in my "Philosophy of Education" section like the
Charlotte Mason method (who advocated not starting formal education until age 6) and
Better Late than Early (which advocates age 8 as a starting "school" age) it may seem that I am a bit inconsistent. Well, truth be told, I am inconsistent (isn't everyone?), but I do really agree with those approaches.
Here's how it happened that my K5-son learned to read. I hesitate to say that I "taught" him because really, I just gave him the very basic concepts and around last Fall (when he was 4 1/2) it "clicked" and there has been no stopping him.
From a very early age, I began talking to my K5-son. This was weird to me at first. It was just him and me in the house and things were kind of quiet. I didn't think it was a good thing to have the TV on all day just for noise, so I started talking to him. Real stuff - not baby talk. I talked about things I was doing, what we were going to do next, why we did certain things. I pointed out things in God's creation. I explained why water bubbles when it gets really hot. I talked a lot about God and how He is our Treasure and the reason we exist. It was difficult to get started. I felt almost like I was just talking to myself. I didn't expect that he understood the chemical process of "boiling" or that he really got "Christ is our Treasure". That time was more of a training for me, I think, than it really was teaching him. I started looking at the world in a different way. I started realizing that the best way for him to learn was for me to talk to him about what I was doing.
My husband and I read to him all the time. We formed a habit of reading books before each nap-time or bed-time and it continues till this day with each of our children.
I started pointing out letters to him. For instance, we would say like "apple" starts with "A" and give the sound for "A". We had a hard foam type A-B-C puzzle that I got from someone at church and we would play "Letter Hunt" (like hunting for Easter Eggs). I would hide the letters in the living room and he would go in and put them in his basket. He loved it. Every time he would find one I would say the name of the letter.
We also started watching the letter animations at
starfall.com during lunch. (Let me say during this time, I was under the impression that reading early was better than later, so I did kind of push things. I don't think he felt pushed and we certainly didn't do anything he wasn't ready and willing to do. However, with my later children I am not pushing things so early. I'm still talking to them, but we haven't started teaching my almost two year old his letters yet.)
When he was around 3, I asked a veteran homeschool mom for advice and she advised me to start teaching him to read right away. I wasn't for sure, but I thought it couldn't hurt as long as I took things slow and didn't frustrate him. We started playing games to learn the sounds of the letters. He learned all the letter sounds, but could not grasp the idea of blending those sounds into words. For instance, he could say the sounds for each letter in C-A-T, but could not blend those into "cat".
It was around this time that I started reading more books on child development and my thinking on early reading and early childhood education changed (more in line to what is found on my sidebars). So, we put away the reading material and kept on talking. We would play rhyming games and "what letter does ___ start with?" and other word games verbally.
During this time we still had Table Time each day and every once in a while I would challenge my K5-son with making simple words out of alphabet magnets.
In November of 2008, he started blending sounds. So, I thought we'd try the
Bob Books. He loved them. He thought they were hilarious and was so proud that he could read a whole book by himself.
I started looking more in-depth at Mary Pecci's
At Last a Reading Method for Every Child. I agreed with her approach and started fitting her concepts into our situation. My son was not ready for writing, so we didn't even go there. We just concentrated on reading and learning the sounds for the good guy consonants, the bad guy consonants, the short and long vowels and learning rules like "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." He really caught on quick.
Though Pecci did not recommend the
Bob Books, I think they were a good start. At first, very phonics based - only words you could sound out. Then as we progressed there got to be more and more sight words as well as the opportunity to use the "sight families" we were learning from the At Last! book. I made
some sheets that would help us with each Bob Book. The sheet contained a review of sight families we had learned in the previous book, an introduction to sight families to be encountered in the current book as well as review/intro of any sight words we were to encounter. We would go over this sheet together before reading each book. When he finished the book, he got to choose a sticker for the sheet and put it in his English Language Notebook.
We didn't finish the Bob Books series, however, because my K5-son eventually got bored with them. (I was secretly glad, because though they do have some plot, it is kind of lame and predictable.) Next, we got our first Pathway Reader from
PaperBackSwap. It was a real story!
First Steps starts out by having a section for the parent to read to get the plot moving and then the child finishes it up. My K5-son really enjoyed reading about Peter, Rachel, Andrew and Miriam and their life on a farm. They almost feel like a part of our family now.
When we first started the
Pathway Readers, I would look in the handy-dandy word index in the back to see what new words we would be reading that day. Instead of introducing all of the sight families from At Last! at once, I would only introduce them the day we would be reading the word, so that he immediately had a chance to use the new family. I stopped making worksheets and would just write the new families on our white board and any families I felt we needed to review. We continued in this pattern through the first and second grade readers.
By the time he was nearing the end of the second grade reader he was figuring out most new words from context and needing only occasional help from me. I didn't really go past the "Sight Families" chapter in the At Last! book and we certainly didn't do any of the worksheets suggested. Sometimes, if I felt he needed a review, I would look at their suggestions for "seatwork" and just make up a verbal game to play. I thought it best not to pin him to a chair, but give him opportunity to learn while using all his energies. Many times we would play these games on a ride somewhere, or while folding clothes, making bread or swinging outside.
My K5-son just started reading
More New Friends with me. I pay attention not only to how well he is figuring out the words, but also his inflection and comprehension. Honestly, he's already read this book...probably several times. He loves to read. Often times when we can't find him, he'll be sitting on his bed with one of his "school" books or a library book reading. Because we like the Pathway Readers so much, we went ahead and bought the set through eighth grade from the
Rainbow Resource Center. (We probably could have got them cheaper either by waiting on
PaperBackSwap or looking on
eBay). He's already read most of the Pathway Readers by himself, but it is helpful to have him read them to me so that I can correct any mispronunciations, inflections, etc.
We haven't used any of the workbooks that come with the Pathway readers. I agree with
Trivium Pursuit in delaying the teaching of formal grammar until age 10, so I just want to make sure now that he has a good reading foundation and that he enjoys reading without worrying about whether he knows the parts of speech. We still play verbal word games on concepts that he would practice on in the workbooks - like making words singular or plural (though I don't use those terms) or practicing how to make a word past tense or future tense. His hands aren't ready for all the writing yet, and I certainly don't see a need to push it.
I don't expect learning to read to be the same for my other children, but the process with my K5-son has been gentle and gone very well.
Steps I used in teaching a child how to read - the condensed version
I found the workbook from Simply Charlotte Mason, Planning Your Charlotte Mason Education, to be extremely helpful. The book walks you through simple steps starting with determining your "Big Picture" down to planning your day.
