Teaching your child to read is one of the most important learning skills they can have. According to research conducted (Bastug, 2014), “Readers with a positive attitude toward reading will have higher achievement in reading and comprehension.” There are a lot of ways to teach your child to read. All of this information can be confusing. But it doesn’t have to feel like an overwhelming task to teach your child to read.  

As a master level educator I want to help you use  the best strategies (using research) on how to actually teach your child to read using my simple steps without any melt downs. 

 

Building Blocks for Reading 

 

Remember when you first learned how to ride a bike? You didn’t just hop on a two wheeled bike and start riding without training wheels. It took practice. Lots of practice, and maybe a few falls too. Similar to riding a bike we can’t just start picking up books and sounding out the letters on the page as a way to teach your child to read. If we did, we would skip way too many steps. The English language is pretty confusing. Sometimes letters make different sounds depending on where they are in a word. For example, the ‘c’ in the word car makes a different sound than the ‘c’ in the word dice. Confusing, right?

The Reading Umbrella 

My favorite way to look at all of the reading skills is to use an umbrella as shown in the picture below. The parts of the reading umbrella include:  

• Phonemic awareness
• Phonics
• Syllables
• Phonemes 
• Onset and rhimes 
• Rhyming words
• Comprehension

You see there are a lot of parts to the reading umbrella, but for the sake of this post, we are going to focus on the actual teaching of how to read. If you are interested in learning more about the other important reading skills found under the umbrella you can find more blog posts about them here.  

How to Actually Teach Your Child To Read 

 So, in order to teach reading, we need to start with building the foundation of reading: phonemic awareness. Before we even show our child letters, we need him or her to be able to recognize the sounds the letters make. These sounds are called phonemes. Research differs in what order you teach the sounds, yet I found the majority start with consonants and end with long vowels then short vowels.  

Tip:

Include word games in your everyday life. This can look like a lot of things. For example, while you are driving in the car and you see a stop sign, you say, “I see a stop sign. Stop sign. I hear two words in stop sign.” Another example is, “Look a bird. I see a bird. I wonder what else rhymes with bird? Bird, heard, curd, etc.” Another example is to say, “A car. Car. I hear the ‘kk’ sound at the beginning of car.” Make word games fun and natural by just talking about what you are seeing in the world around you.  

Step 1: How to Actually Teach Your Child to Read 

 Before we start grabbing all of the ‘I can read!’ books off the shelves, it’s important to know where your learner is currently at. In elementary school these are called assessments. We need to assess, or check, what they already know about reading. This can be a quick check.  

Here’s how to perform a quick assessment:

 

1. Grab a sheet of paper and write the alphabet on one side of the paper. 
2. Next you will need a set of alphabet flash cards.
   You can download and use my free assessment guide and free ABC flash cards. 
3. Tell your learner you are going to check their letter sounds. 
4. Show your learner the alphabet cards and have them tell you the sound the letter makes, not the letter name. They should be able to do this quickly, within a few seconds. For example, if the letter is ‘m’. They should say ‘mmm’ and not ‘m’. If they say the letter name, a simple correction you can say is, “You told me the name of the letter. I’m asking for the sound this letter makes.” 
5. If they say the correct letter sound, make a checkmark next to the letter. If your child doesn’t know the letter sound make an x mark next to the letter. Repeat with all of the letters in the alphabet. 
6. Vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, have a long and short sound. It’s important they learn both, but for this first check one sound is ok. You can teach the difference of long and short vowels later. This also applies to other letters that make multiple sounds, like the letter ‘c’. One sound is ok for this purpose. 
7. Once you go through the entire alphabet you can see how many letter sounds your child knows. If they know all of their letter sounds, great! You are ready to move onto blending sounds together. 

Tip:

• Don’t go in order of the alphabet. This is not a memorization activity. Your learner should be able to recognize letters in any order. 
• Ask your learner to tell you the letter sound not the name. 

Step 2: How to Actually Teach Your Child to Read 

It is exciting that your learner knows their letter sounds, this is a huge step in your child’s  reading journey! You both should be very proud. Next up is blending.  Personally, I like blending letter sounds without using any letter sounds. This is a great place to tie sounds and blending together before adding in a book.  

Here’s how to blend letter sounds:

 

1. Tell your learner that you are going to play a game called blend it and all you need is your body. 
2. Start with two letter sound words. Some examples are: on, it, as, am, in, me, is just to name a few. There are many two letter sound lists you can find online or you can grab my free two letter blending sounds list here. 
3. Model how to blend first then have your learner try. You can say: 
   “I’m going to show you how this game works first. Then it will be your turn. I’ll say two sounds slowly and touch my arm then I will blend them together fast. Watch me.” Let’s try with the word ‘me.’ You will touch your shoulder and say “mmmm” and then touch your wrist and say “eeee”. Then put your hand back to your shoulder and start saying “mmmmm” as you slide your hand down to your wrist continue saying “eeeee”. When you get to the end of your wrist say, ‘me.’ Now your turn. 
4. Tell your learner it is their turn but do the actions with them until they get the hang of it. If they aren’t quite getting the hang of it, don’t feel frustrated. Encourage them and keep showing them how to do it. Remember repetition = learning. Repeat for a few words in one sitting depending on how long your learner stays focused and engaged. Don’t push it to frustration. This should be fun to see how fast they can slide their hand down their arm. 

Keep working on blending two sounds for a few days before moving into 3 letter sounds also called consonant, vowel, consonant words.  

Tip:

• When starting to practice three letter sounds continue the same process as before while including the middle sound at your elbow. For example if the word is ‘cat’ you would blend like this: Say, “kk” and touch your shoulder, say “aa” and touch your elbow, and say “tt” and touch your wrist. Then go back to your shoulder and slide your hand down your arm moving between the letter sounds as you go.  

Step 3: How to Actually Teach Your Child to Read 

After you have practiced blending two letters and three letters together, your learner is ready to read their first book. How exciting! I highly recommend buying some beginner reading books that use simple two and three letter words to start off. I have successfully used Bob books to teach children to read. They are short, simple, and silly books for little ones.  However, whatever book you find, just make sure you go through it and read it ahead of time to make sure your learner won’t be surprised by any longer words.  

Now it’s time to actually read! Here’s how to read your first book with your learner:

 

1. Tell your learner, “Today we are going to read a book together! I’m excited. First, let’s look at the book’s pictures so we know what we are going to be reading about.” Take a moment to look through the book and point out the pictures with your reading. Parents and caregivers who introduce young children to books in a variety of ways have a positive impact on their pre reading abilities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).
2. Next, go over any common words that are repeated. For example, in the first Bob book, Sam is one of the character’s names, it would be good to practice blending his name before reading. Simply find the page that has the word on it and just like you blended sounds on your arm, blend the letters for the word. Go slow, then fast. You can always use hand motions too so your learner can make the connection between hearing the sounds and reading the letters on the page.  
3. Go ahead and start reading. If your learner struggles on a word for more than a few seconds, help them. The first time won’t be perfect and that’s ok. Just don’t leave them alone to sound out the words without help. Use teamwork to get through the book and be super proud of them when you finish.

Tip:

 

• Being able to go from just hearing the sounds to being able to read the letters and blend the sounds together is a big step for little ones. Be patient! If your learner starts feeling frustrated keep their spirits up so they don’t get discouraged. Also, be your learner’s cheerleader. If you show them how excited you are to read with them, they will more likely be excited too. Don’t worry if the first book is bumpy, you can go back and probably should go back and reread the first book many times before moving on. 

The next steps 

Congratulations! You must be very proud of your learner to be able to read their first book. Good for you both! You have laid a great, and strong reading foundation to build upon.  Next up, you can continue moving through reading the Bob Books, or your choice of books, with your learner, and continue blending more words together. Don’t forget you can always go back to the ABC flash cards or playing the blend it game before moving on to the next book if you see your learner struggling, or just to freshen up their skills.  Keep up the good work. I’m rooting for you!  – Sarah