National Right to Reading Foundation's Steps to Teaching Reading

Combined with this being a busy week and my daughter rebelling slightly at so much nightly work, we have not done as much reading this week together as I would like. That and between trying to be a full-time career woman, keeping a house, making meals, teaching reading and researching for methods for teaching reading better, I am simply tired. It is all worth it, though, when I see my daughter reading better and actually having fun with her reading; and to see my son starting to learn how to sound out words. So, a small break (not a total break) will hopefully result in a recharge for all of us.

I plan for us to pick up again over the weekend. We have some new books from Scholastic through the school for my daughter and we'll alternate between those and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid (DOWK). That should give us some variety and maybe a mix of levels since DOWK has some very challenging words for a 1st grader.

My son, however, has shown even more interest in reading this week. We have some new phonics-based reading books from my recent order from Scholastic through the school. The stories are a bit more interesting than what we have from the Bob Books. Both sets have some of the sight words, which we are sounding out together instead of memorizing. My goal is for my son to know as many of the sight words before school as possible - but not from just memorizing them, but from learning them from sounding them out as we come to them. For sight words that can't be sounded out, we will examine as much of the word as possible and I'll show my son how the word is just weird, so to speak.

Also, I have some new ideas for my son from the following website at the National Right to Reading Foundation's website:

http://www.nrrf.org/PhonicsPrimer.pdf

Based upon my son's knowledge so far and progress, I think we'll focus a bit on step 5 and see how much my son already knows and fill in the rest. He knows some of the step 6 combinations from the Leap Frog videos, which teach th, ch, and some others.

I do not intend, however, not to introduce books to him in the meantime, as suggested in Step 13. I already have lots of phonics groundwork laid with respect to my son. So, I plan to keep the books simple - the type of words that can be read using skills in steps 2 -4 of this list. Also, I have read some sources that recommend that the books you have your children read should contain only "decodable words." That means that you want your child to know the phonics rules necessary to sound out all the words in the book. So, before you get to books with new types of decoding issues, you have to teach the decoding skills.

What I find most interesting about this step by step approach by the National Right to Read Foundation is Step 7 which provides some suggestions for teaching some of the sight words which are not fully decodable with a more phonics appropriate approach. I plan to try this suggestion. The rest of the sight words, according to this site, are decodable, so they can be learned using phonics. As I mentioned above, hopefully, my son will learn as many sight words using phonics as possible before the school tries to get him to memorize them.