Learning to read

Learning to read is a process which begins early on. Without even realizing, we start this process when we read to our babies, showing them the books and pictures. Going from here to independent reading takes many years but the more stimulus you provide the more apt your child will become.

Our eldest son began reading sight words and short sentences a couple of months before his fourth birthday. He has now (at 4.1years) started sounding out the words phonetically. So, how did we get to this point?

We have used several methods combined to make this learning process lots of fun. First we started sight words. These are high frequency words that can be learnt without sounding them out phonetically (a list of our first sight words can be found at the bottom of this post). Watch a video of me presenting sight words to our youngest son here. We do this once or twice a day until they are confident with the words, then we move onto another few. When they have learnt around 20 words we start setting up three word sentences such as "I like you" or "He is happy".

The next step is learning to sound out other words phonetically. For this we enlisted the help of the alphablocks! We found many videos on YouTube and both boys really enjoyed learning the sounds of the letters through these characters. Once they had a handle on this I chose a few starter readers for them to begin reading. With the combination of sight words and phonetically sounding out other words our eldest son can read simple sentences and get to the end of a simple book.

Another great resource we have used is oxfordowl.co.uk. There are suggested methods on helping your child to read and there is a whole collection of Ebooks you can listen to or read online. Every week my sons choose a book to read and we go through it together. They look so proud when they can read a sentence or sound out a word and it is the beginning of a lifetime of reading.

It helps too, that our boys see us reading often. We have a space for them to take books and read alone or ask us to read to them. Both me and my husband enjoy reading and hope to share this with our boys.

List of sight words
I                    Not                    Did
A                   Are                    Have
Can               More                  The
We                It                         In
Like              Is                        Run
You               See                     To
No                Big                      Happy
Yes               Up                       Some

Here are a few ideas of products which can help with sight words (affiliate links)

Sight word Bingo

Sight word fridge magnets

Alphablocks DVD