What Can I Do to Help My Child Learn to Read? Part 2

As I mentioned in my Dec. 23 posting, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified five areas of reading instruction that must be addressed when teaching children to read. My first post was on Phonemic Awareness, the ability to notice, understand, and work with the sounds in words. This post will address Phonics.

What exactly is Phonics?

Phonics is a method of teaching reading, based on sounding out letters to read words. Let’s say that you learn the letter i makes the /i/ sound, and that the letter t makes the /t/ sound. And when you read these sounds together, /i/ /t/, you have it. You’ve just used phonics to read the word it.

How can I use phonics to help my child learn to read?

Here’s an easy activity you can do with your child using our phonics teaching method. In just 20 minutes, your child can read a book all by himself by playing an easy flashcard game and printing out our free Learn to Read Minibook.
Just follow these instructions:

1. Make one flashcard for each of the letters d, n, a, r, b, t, and p, for a total of 7 cards. You can use index cards or just cut up a piece of plain paper. Lay them on the table.
2. Help your child to put the cards together that form the words dan, ran, bat, pat, and at. Call out the name of each letter and the sound it makes as you push the cards together. Do this a few times until your child can do it all by himself.
3. Print out all of the pages of our free minibook by clicking on this link: Learn to Read Minibook
4. Once you have printed the pages, cut each page in half by cutting on the dotted line.
5. Stack all of the pages together with the cover on the front, followed by page 1, page 2, etc., until all of the pages are in order. Do not include the instructions.
6. Staple along the left side of the pages.
7. Finish the book by tracing all of the words with dotted lines.
8. Have your child color all of the pages.

Your child is now ready to read the book he just made all by himself! He has already learned to read each word by playing the flashcard game. Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read is full of activities just like this one, plus story books, workbooks, online games, flashcards, and much, much more.

What Can I Do to Help My Child Learn to Read?

We hear from many parents about their children’s struggles with learning to read. Difficulties with reading can have a negative long-term effect on a children’s self-esteem, their desire to learn and succeed in school, and ultimately their success in life.

Although there are no quick ways to teach children to read, it doesn’t have to be a difficult task. In the next blog posts I will outline the basic skills children must master in order to learn to read. These posts will go hand in hand with the recommendations made by the National Reading Panel’s (NRP) 2000 report. The goals of the report were simple: to identify what works when teaching children to read. The NRP report identified five areas of reading instruction that must be addressed in order to teach children to read:

1. Phonemic Awareness: Being able to notice, understand, and work with the sounds in words.
2. Phonics: A method of teaching reading, based on sounding out letters to read words.
3. Fluency: Being able to read accurately and quickly.
4. Vocabulary: Knowing what words mean when we hear and read them.
5. Text Comprehension: Truly understanding what is read.

How can I help my child gain phonemic awareness?
There are many activities that can help parents accomplish this task. Here are two simple ones that you can do with your child without having to buy, make, or read anything (outside of this post!). When you see a letter between slashes, /a/, it represents the sound of the letter. When you see a letter in bold, a, it represents the name of the letter.

Activity 1:
Parent: Listen to this word: cat. One more time: cat. /k/ /a/ /t/. Can you say the word?
Child:cat.
Parent: Good job! Now can you say the sounds? /k/ /a/ /t/.
(If your child makes an error, be positive--“Good try!” “That was pretty close!” “You almost got it!”--and ask him to try again.)
Child: /k/ /a/ /t/.
Parent: That was great! Now write each letter for the word cat. Write the letter that makes this sound /k/ (allow your child to write the letter c); /a/ (allow your child to write the letter a); /t/ (allow your child to write the letter t).
Child: /k/ (child writes letter c); /a/ (child writes letter a); /t/ (child writes letter t); cat.
Parent: You said AND wrote the word cat. You are so smart! (Now try more words like fan, sad, bat, pig, pen, and box.)

Activity 2:
Watch this video with your child. Listen to the narrator and follow the prompts:

Helping Your Child Blend Sounds to Read Words

What is blending? In phonics, blending is the ability to recognize sounds and manipulate them in order to read words. To blend, children must first say each sound and then blend them together. For example, if you say each of these sounds, /c/ /a/ /t/, and blend them together, you get the word cat.

Children must be able to blend parts of words together and recombine them easily to read words they don’t know and to acquire fluency (the ability to read accurately with speed and expression). Although many children learn to blend sounds independently, others must be taught the process step by step. The sooner a child learns to blend, the more easily he will learn to read fluently.

A great way to teach blending is to start with cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, for example, fan. Words that start and end with the sounds /f/, /v/, /n/, /m/, /l/, and /s/ are easier to blend because they can be drawn out: /ffffaaaannnn/.Have the child say each sound of the word fan, pausing after each sound:/f/-/a/-/n/. Have the child repeat the sounds again, this time by holding each sound as they move to the next.: /fff//aaa//nnn/. Repeat several times a little faster until the sounds are blended and the child can read the word: /fffaaannn/, /ffaann/, fan.

You can give your kids a head start by helping them learn to read a few words before they even start school. We’ve made it easy for you: Here’s a script for teaching them to blend sounds to read the word mat:
Parent: ‘When you see a letter, make its sound: (letter a) /aaa/’
Child: ‘/aaa/’
Parent: ‘(letter t) /t/’
Child: ‘/t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say both sounds: /aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Child: ‘/aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘A little faster: /aa/ /t/, /aa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, a little faster: /a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Child: ‘/a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say the sounds together, starting at the left and moving to the right. Ready? /at/, /at/.’
Child: ‘/at/, /at/’
Parent: ‘Now. Let’s add one more sound: /mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/.’
Child: ‘/mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/’
Parent: ‘Now, blend the sounds together, starting from the left and moving to the right: /mmaat/, /mmaat/.
Child: ‘/mmaat/, /mmaat/’
Parent: ‘One more time: mat.’
Child: ‘mat’
Parent: ‘You read mat!’

Watch this clip for a visual representation of this blending lesson…

Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read wins the 2009 MITX Best Educational Website Award

We are very proud to announce that Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read has just won the MITX Best Education and Learning Website Award for 2009. The MITX Awards is the largest and one of the most prestigious awards competition in the country for interactive and web innovations and celebrates the best creative and technological accomplishments emerging from New England.

We'd like to celebrate with our readers by offering a 40% discount on the new Learn to Read Pre-K to 2nd Grade system. Just go to our (award winning!) Learn to Read website and enter the following code: HOP40

MITX Awards

Learning to Print

How many of us remember learning to print? As an adult, it’s really second-nature, isn’t it? It’s hard to think back and remember trying to get the order of the lines right and just the right proportions of the letters.

It’s in Pre-K and Kindergarten where children usually get their first exposure to organized learning and where they begin to learn about the world, usually through play. This is where you and I were most likely introduced to the very basics of the alphabet, and that certain letters make certain sounds, not to mention the specific shapes of each letter. Learning letter names, sounds, and shapes is the first step to becoming a great reader. Many children start to learn to print at this age.

Learning to print helps children distinguish words from pictures and to understand that print carries meaning. However, learning to print is not intuitive. It may seem simple enough on the surface, but there are multiple skills involved: basic pencil-control skills as well as drawing vertical and horizontal lines, diagonal lines, and the dreaded curved and wavy lines.

When I first taught kindergarten a few years back, I wondered about the best way to teach my students to print. Should I start with the letter A? If so, should I start from the top and work down? Should I make the left diagonal line first?

For those of you that also struggle with such profound philosophical questions, I have included a few nifty videos that will answer them once and for all. They tackle letters down to their easiest and simplest form. You won't have to worry about confusing the lowercase L with the uppercase I after watching these videos. You don’t believe me? See for yourselves...

Teach Your Child to Blend Letters and Sounds

What is blending? In phonics, blending is the ability to recognize sounds and manipulate them in order to read words. To blend, children must first say each sound and then blend them together. For example, if you say each of these sounds, /c/ /a/ /t/, and blend them together, you get the word cat.

Children must be able to blend parts of words together and recombine them easily to read words they don’t know and to acquire fluency (the ability to read accurately with speed and expression). Although many children learn to blend sounds independently, others must be taught the process step by step. The sooner a child learns to blend, the more easily he will learn to read fluently.

A great way to teach blending is to start with cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, for example, fan. Words that start and end with the sounds /f/, /v/, /n/, /m/, /l/, and /s/ are easier to blend because they can be drawn out: /ffffaaaannnn/.Have the child say each sound of the word fan, pausing after each sound:/f/-/a/-/n/. Have the child repeat the sounds again, this time by holding each sound as they move to the next.: /fff//aaa//nnn/. Repeat several times a little faster until the sounds are blended and the child can read the word: /fffaaannn/, /ffaann/, fan.

You can give your kids a head start by helping them learn to read a few words before they even start school. We’ve made it easy for you: Here’s a script for teaching them to blend sounds to read the word mat:
Parent: ‘When you see a letter, make its sound: (letter a) /aaa/’
Child: ‘/aaa/’
Parent: ‘(letter t) /t/’
Child: ‘/t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say both sounds: /aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Child: ‘/aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘A little faster: /aa/ /t/, /aa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, a little faster: /a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Child: ‘/a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say the sounds together, starting at the left and moving to the right. Ready? /at/, /at/.’
Child: ‘/at/, /at/’
Parent: ‘Now. Let’s add one more sound: /mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/.’
Child: ‘/mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/’
Parent: ‘Now, blend the sounds together, starting from the left and moving to the right: /mmaat/, /mmaat/.
Child: ‘/mmaat/, /mmaat/’
Parent: ‘One more time: mat.’
Child: ‘mat’
Parent: ‘You read mat!’

Watch this clip for a visual representation of this blending lesson…

Reading Tips

• Here are a few reading tips and strategies that will encourage children of all ages to love reading and become life-long readers!

• Set aside ‘special time’ for reading with your child: This will encourage your child to develop a reading routine that will make reading part of his/her daily life. Read to your child everyday, if you can! 8-17

• Create a ‘Reading Space’ in your home. A comfortable chair, a library of fun and interesting books, a fuzzy rug, anything that makes your child feel comfortable and ready to learn. Your child will know that entering this ‘Reading Space’ signals a learning mind set.

• Have books and printed materials available everywhere. Not just i the library or the bookshelves—in the car, in the bathroom, on the beach. Let your child get ‘Hooked On Reading’ by making books and printed materials omnipresent.

• Read aloud to your child—and let your child read aloud to you. Children love to be the center of attention and showing off their skills. Encourage your ‘emerging’ reader with positive reinforcement, ‘What a nice story’, ‘You are such a good reader!’, ‘That was very close, it’s pronounced ENCHANTED’.

• Ham it up! Make funny voices and sound effects. Children love the theatrical aspects of reading ‘in character’.