Good books, funny books, repetitive, rhythmic books; books they read independently and books you can read together; useful as the resources below are, the best way to teach reading is to immerse children in books they’ll want to read. If they want to read, they will!
Hours every day were (and still are!) spent losing themselves in the worlds created on the pages of a wildly eclectic pile of books. It was time well spent and gave them not only confidence in reading but also taught them to find pleasure in the act of reading. Now, as pre/teens, they still read daily – for school and for enjoyment.
Whether you’re homeschooling from the beginning or are switching to home education from mainstream schooling, allowing learners time to fall in love with books, to become confident independent and read-out-loud readers will benefit all aspects of a home-ed curriculum.
N.B. if your child has a special educational need that makes reading difficult for them – don’t worry. You can still immerse them in books by reading to them, encourage ‘reading’ independently via audiobooks and use AI apps like Trellis to help with academic reading. Ultimately what makes reading important is the ability to access the words communicated through the text: If they can do that, that’s great.
Why use ‘Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons’?
We didn’t start formal timetabled ‘school’ with our children until they were 7+. When they were learning to read, lessons weren’t timetabled at all so I wanted a textbook to guide us that:
- could be slotted easily into the day,
- required little (or no) prep for me,
- and was going to be effective at teaching them to read confidently.
The book needed to be simple to follow (and to teach from) and with lessons that were short but beneficial. I settled on ‘Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons‘. It differs from the phonics systems used by schools in the UK but worked well for our children.
To use this system with our home learners required reading the book first to understand the teaching style – using a system of phonemic awareness (rhyming, blending, segmenting) – and familiarising myself with the symbols used to indicate letter-sound correspondences.
Once the system made sense, teaching from the book was simple and the only prep I needed to do was re-read the particular section we’d be focused on that day to preempt any challenges. There’s debate about whether phonics is the right way to teach reading but the system worked well for our children and was useful to refer back to when correcting pronunciation mistakes.
‘Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons‘ progresses logically, simultaneously building on phonics and encouraging writing practice. I appreciated how the structure of the system visually represented to our homeschoolers the progression they were making; the pages get noticeably more difficult but because the content flows in a logical, rhythmical way, the difficulty doesn’t intimidate.
Dr Phyllis Haddock who co-authored the book hosts a video series explaining in detail how to use the book – it’s essentially a teacher-training course for this specific book and it’s really worth watching. Even if you’re not going to use the book, lots of the tips will be useful as you teach your child to read.
Downloadable on her website (under the videos) are supplementary instructional materials to use while helping your child learn to read. These materials could be used as word games to extend the lessons in the book, or as flashcard-style reference cards (for both the teacher and the child) as you get used to the structure of the book.
The alphabetical list of vocabulary covered in the book is a great resource that could be used as spelling tests and the Alphabet Practice Strip would make a great handwriting lesson resource.
All of the supplementary material and videos accompanying ‘How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons’ can be found here.
Alongside this book, our home learners used and loved the Reading Eggs app. The additional independent reading practice feels like a game to young homeschoolers and makes it easy to add an extra twenty minutes of independent reading into a home-ed day.