Teaching Kids to Read For Dummies

Tracey Wood

• Editorial: For Dummies
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118068939
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Enseñanza de métodos de lectura

You're thinking of teaching a child to read. What a great idea! Now all you need is exactly the right blueprint. This easy-to-follow book is written with two people in mind; you, and the child you're thinking of teaching. Mother and children's reading specialist Tracey Wood gives you all the down-to-earth, honest information you need to give a child a happy, solid start with reading.

Teaching Kids to Read For Dummies is for parents of young children who want to give their kids a head start by teaching them to read before they enter school or to supplement their children's school instruction, as well as teachers and caregivers of young children. Filled with hands-on activities that progress a child from sounds to words to sentences to books, this friendly guide shows you how to:

• Prepare a child to read
• Sharpen his listening skills
• Correct her errors graciously
• Choose the right books
• Have kids read out loud
• Find help if you need it

Whether the child you want to teach is two or twelve; fast paced or steady; an absolute beginner or someone who's begun but could use a little help, this empathetic book shows you how to adapt the simple, fun activities to your child's individual needs. You'll see how to make activities age appropriate, how to add more challenge or support, and how to make gender allowances if that's relevant.

Plus, you'll discover how to:

• Lay the foundation for good reading skills
• Tell the difference between a reading delay and a reading problem
• Help your child build words from letters and sounds, advance to short and long vowel words, and conquer syllables and silent letters
• Select entertaining workbooks, recycle them, and make up your own reading activities
• Get your child ready for sentences
• Keep your child reading — with others or on his own

Complete with lists of word families, phonics rules, and reading resources, Teaching Kids to Read For Dummies will help you make learning fun for your child as he or she develops this critical skill!

Part I

Preparing Your Child for the Road Ahead

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

Well, you’ve done a lot of thinking and talking about how you’re going to teach your child to read, and now it’s time for action. Oh boy. Where do you start? What do you do exactly? Should you use some sort of easiest to hardest progression? Don’t worry, this part has the answers. It moves you gently from sounds to letters to words. You can find out how to get the hang of things like long vowel sounds and blended letters, and it’s chock full of fun activities to steer you clear of the phonics-is-so-dull pitfall. I talk about the best time to get your child started on reading, too. Should you be hiring a (stern) tutor, putting a clamp on the TV, or dishing up Dostoyevsky? This part gives you inspiring, practical, and manageable answers.

Chapter 1

The Wonder and Power of Reading

In This Chapter

Taking a look at the reading process and when to do it

Meeting letters, words, and the weird stuff

Reading as a family affair

Getting help

N ot long ago, I lived in a house nestled in a quiet wooded hillside. Sometimes, I sat in the garden soaking up the great outdoors, but more often, I’d be gathering the clothes and kitchen implements my children had sneaked outside. My children lived in a fantasy world of wizards and spells inspired by the children’s books they read every night. They found all sorts of unlikely capes and wands to help them enact their parts. As I gathered their broomsticks and bowls of potion, I often felt guilty. The man next door, retired with grown children of his own, liked to head outside, too; quietly, with coffee and newspapers. My kids’ tremendous hullabaloo must shatter his peace, I thought. One day, my neighbor stood on his verandah and saw me. He beckoned me over. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said. “I call your girls the princesses. They play such fantastic games! I love listening to them. They’re so spirited and imaginative, you should be very proud.” Yes, exactly, I thought! What a discerning neighbor! What fine kids! What a mom!

Reading is wonderful and powerful. It can turn little girls into princesses and back gardens into enchanted forests. When your child can read, he gets to experience and work through all sorts of situations, fantastic or real. He can live other lives and go to other places. He gets a broader view of life. And, as if this broad perspective weren’t enough to convince you of the importance of teaching your child to read, there’s the more mundane, but no less important, truth that good readers get better jobs.

Understanding the Process

Here’s where it all starts! I’m about to plunge you into the world of sounding-out, sight words, suffixes, and much more. You get masses of information and advice, but it’s going to be fun. This chapter gives you a quick overview of everything that’s coming up. Here, I squash this whole book down into a few pages, leaving out whopping chunks so that you have to read the rest of the book!

You’re a good reader. You’re reading this book, so you must be. You probably don’t remember when or how you started to read. It was all so long ago and, as far as you know, it just happened. Well, that’s where my vantage point comes in handy for you. I know that reading didn’t just happen for you, at all. Even though I wasn’t there, I know that you put together a whole collection of skills to reach that final end:

You got the hang of sounding words out.

You learned some words so well that you knew them by sight.

When you looked through books, you used a lot of contextual cues to fill any gaps you had.

You stuck with books because you were a successful reader and had fun reading.

So, now I’ve told you a bit of your life history. And better still, you’re more ready to help your child learn to read than you were a couple of minutes ago. How’s that? Well, now you know that to be a reader, your child has to acquire some reading skills and have fun doing it.

A lightning tour of sounding out

Sounding out is the backbone of reading. You can sound out most text, so children have to learn how. You may think that sounding out (called phonics in schools) starts with “a is for apple,” but that’s not strictly true. In school, children are taught that “a is for apple,” but before that, and largely at home, you’ve already started your child on phonemic learning. At home, when you sing songs and chant rhymes and poems, you’re building phonemic awareness. You’re showing your child that words and sentences are made of different sounds, and you’re helping her hear those sounds. And that awareness is the most important precursor to reading. When your child identifies the small sounds in words and sentences, she’s wired up to attach those sounds to letters later on. Great, isn’t it? All this time, when you’ve been talking, singing, and rhyming, you’ve been your child’s first, and perhaps most important, reading teacher.

If you play the sounding-out version of “I Spy with My Little Eye” with your child, give yourself a pat on the back. By saying things like, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with muh,” you’re focusing your child’s attention on sounds. I rank this activity as the number one game for helping your child with phonemic awareness. Check out Chapter 3 for more on phonics.

A peep at sight words

In this book, I also give you a quick overview of how your child gets to know some words by sight. A few years ago, learning words by sight meant using a “look and say” method. Parents or teachers showed kids flashcards and, as long as the children saw the flashcards often enough, they were expected to remember those cards. But it turned out that the “look and say” method wasn’t as great as people had thought. In fact, it wasn’t very effective at all. Kids couldn’t remember dozens of words only by the way they looked. None of us can remember large amounts of information unless we have some help. We need little memory joggers, and the information we’re trying to absorb must mean something to us, too. So, the sight words I talk about in this book aren’t “look and say” words, they’re words you get to know by sounding out and using contextual cues until you have instant recognition of them. I go into detail about sight words, and give you some fun activities to play with your child, in Chapter 11.

Sight words occur so often in any text that your child has to get to know them by sight. Otherwise, he’s constantly stopping and starting when he reads and doe...

Índice

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Preparing Your Child for the Road Ahead
• Chapter 1: The Wonder and Power of Reading
• Chapter 2: The Pre-Reader: Leading Up to Letters
• Chapter 3: Tigers and Teachers: Listening to Letters
• Chapter 4: m or n? b or d? Looking at Letters
• Chapter 5: Blending Letters Together
• Chapter 6: Four Special Sounds in Reading: ch, sh, ph, and th
• Part II : Building Words from Letters and Sounds
• Chapter 7: Getting Ready for Words and Sentences
• Chapter 8: Reading Short a Words
• Chapter 9: Reading Short e, i, and o Words
• Chapter 10: Reading Short u Words
• Part III : Advancing to Sight Words and Long Vowel Sounds
• Chapter 11: Understanding Sight Words
• Chapter 12: Making Big Progress with Little Rules
• Chapter 13: y: A Letter Like No Other
• Part IV : Scary Stuff Beginning with S: Soft Sounds, Suffixes, Syllables, and Silent Letters
• Chapter 14: Soft Sounds
• Chapter 15: Endings (a.k.a. Suffixes)
• Chapter 16: Chunks of Sound, or Syllables
• Chapter 17: Time to Growl: ar, or, er, ir, and ur
• Chapter 18: Silent (But Not Deadly) Letters
• Chapter 19: Getting Beyond Sounds and Rules
• Part V : Reading, Reading, and More Reading
• Chapter 20: Choosing Just-Right Reading Books
• Chapter 21: Writing and Workbooks
• Chapter 22: Having Your Child Read Out Loud
• Chapter 23: Keeping Your Child on the Reading Track
• Chapter 24: When to Get Help for Your Child
• Part VI : The Part of Tens
• Chapter 25: More Than Ten Word Families
• Chapter 26: Ten Phonics Rules
• Chapter 27: Ten Things to Help Your Budding Reader
• Chapter 28: Ten Reading Teachers’ Resources
• Appendix: A Word Family Tree