Reading programs are everywhere. You can find books, tapes, videos, and programs online. If you live in a city, there is likely a tutoring program available as well. As a parent, he knows that learning to read is one of the most important skills his child will need to master in early childhood, and he is quite overwhelmed by the challenge.
It’s natural to think that it would be much easier to buy a program and use it to teach your child to read. However, there are two big problems with this method. First, not all programs work as effectively as they promise. For every “satisfied” customer you see in promotional material, you don’t know how many dissatisfied customers may be lurking behind the scenes. Second, you don’t know if this particular program will be an effective match for your child’s learning style. The program may work well for some children but not for others. Learning to read is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Most professional reading teachers use a blended approach that uses a combination of methods and techniques.
Any one of these issues is a major concern when considering the financial cost of most of these programs, not to mention the time commitment involved. Plus, you could be spending a lot of time (and money) and actually negatively affect your child’s reading progress.
The real truth (which these so-called educational companies don’t want you to know) is that there is a lot of free information available to help you teach your child to read, and very often, using a simple common sense approach can be more effective than all those expensive reading programs combined.
Step One – Make sure your child knows the alphabet (both visual recognition and the sounds the letter makes)
Step Two: Develop print awareness and literacy by reading books and other materials (posters, greeting cards, handwritten notes, etc.) so that children understand that books are read from front to back, the lines from left to right and pages from top to bottom.
Step Three: Go beyond step one to build understanding of beginning letter sounds and then add ending sounds (rhymes). Show how many words can be “decoded” by breaking them down into initial, middle, and final sounds
Step Four: Teach high-frequency words with various exercises and regular repetition
Step Five: Help put it all together by making sentences with the words they know or can decode, and then introduce books (carefully selected or invented by you and the child) that include those words and sentences.
By using these five simple steps, you can teach your child to read without buying expensive reading software. You can make your own materials at home, get materials to use from the Internet, or borrow materials from your local public library. You don’t need to spend a dime on these free reading lessons, except for what you choose to buy to build your child’s personal library of books.