Simple Preschool: Reading

Join me every week as I show you how me and my 4-year-old Certain Little Someone do simple preschool at home.

No curriculum, no pressure, but lots of learning!

Reading is a natural extension of phonics. You won’t get too far in the phonics instruction before you naturally start to blend the sounds together to form words. And it doesn’t take a genius, or even an expert, to instruct young children in the art and science of reading English. It doesn’t even really require any special curriculum or equipment. It just takes a patient person who already knows how to read English and can follow a few simple steps.

First Things First

The first step to reading is learning the alphabet and the primary sound of each letter (for example, for the letter “g” I would first teach the hard g sound - as in goat). Once your child has these sounds down, they can start blending them. And blending is the beginning of reading.

To begin with, you’ll want to blend one consonant with one vowel. You can go one of two ways: put the consonant first, or put the consonant last. There are pros and cons to each method.

If you start with the consonant, you end up with blends like “ma”, “fi”, “ju” and the like. These blends are a great jumping point to blend into words - if he can read “ma” easily, all he has to do is add a consonant to the end to form a word like “map” or “mat”. The main problem with this is that those blends do not follow the basic rules of English phonetics. Technically, a syllable that ends in a vowel typically makes the long sound and not the short sound (for example: ta-ble, ci-ta-tion). The other problem is that the majority of phonics curriculums and available worksheets do not use this blending method, so you’re almost on your own when it comes to supplementary materials.

A more popular method with many is to teach blending with a final consonant, thus creating “word families”. For example: “an” can be turned into a multitude of other words like “can”, or “fan” or “pan” with the addition of an initial consonant. This is more consistent with the rules of phonics, but it’s not as intuitive when it comes to actual reading. The child almost has to read backwards in order to blend together a word using this method, because they have to identify the rime (the ending phoneme, such as “-an” or “-am”) before then adding the onset (the initial consonant sound) to it.

I’ve done it both ways, and in my opinion, it’s easier for the child to turn a beginning blend into a word than it is to use the onset and rime/word family method. It may not be 100% phonetically accurate, but hey! They’re not learning syllabication yet, so it’s no big deal. By the time they do get around to learning syllabication, they will have forgotten that they used to say “ma” “me” “mi” “mo” “mu” with short vowels.

Add the Final (or Initial) Consonant

No matter which way you choose, stick to it. And once the child is comfortable reading those word parts (whether “ma” or “am”), begin adding final or initial consonants, blending them together as you do. It’s helpful to start out with consonants that can be stretched, like “m” or “n”, and the like: “mmmmmm…ap”, for example.

Spend a looonnngggg time on this step, until the child is very comfortable with it. Within the context of what we call “CVC” (3-letter short vowel) words, you can explore a lot of concepts, like rhyming. You can make up silly words if you want, too!

At this point, you can also start reading through very simple early readers, beginning with books that have fewer than 5 words on a page with some pictures to catch the eye and the interest of a little one. See the bottom of this post for resources and my personal recommendations.

Onward and Forward

Once your child has mastered the basic idea of blending, then it’s just a matter of giving them opportunities to blend each new sound they learn into words. Following the Phonics progression I mentioned a couple weeks ago, just incorporate each of those new sounds into words and then give them books with those more advanced sounds.

Punctuation

While true English grammar education doesn’t start for another year or two, it is essential to teach a few basics of punctuation that will aid in reading. It’s not necessary to devote a great deal of time to these; just explain what their purpose is and what they are called.

Periods are like stop signs: they tell us when the sentence ends. We always pause when we come to a period, and our voice falls.

Question marks mean a question is being asked. It also means the end of a sentence, but this time the voice rises at the end.

An exclamation point also indicates the end of a sentence (note, by the way, that both question marks and exclamation points contain a period), and means that we should read it with excitement!

Quotation marks mean someone is speaking, and this is what they said.

A comma is just a way to separate lists of words.

Those are the basic punctuation elements a child will encounter in early reading, and there’s no need to get anymore involved than that.

Sight Words

I mentioned sight words in my post about Phonics, but just wanted to remind you here that they are an essential element of learning to read. Drill a few of them every day, and don’t insist on your child sounding them out (Have you ever tried sounding out “the”? Yeah, doesn’t work.). If they forget what it is, just remind them. Eventually, they will remember on their own.

Fluency, Expression, and Comprehension

It’s not enough to be able to read the words. The words must be read fluently, with good expression and understanding on the part of the reader.

Fluency involves practice. And more practice. And then a little bit more practice. Read, read, read, read, read. And then read some more. This process might take years, so relax, and don’t try to force it. Just keep doing it.

Expression should be encouraged from the very beginning. Nobody likes to listen to a dull monotone voice reciting a story! At first, just re-read what your child read with excitement and appropriate expression in your own voice, then give them a chance to do the same. Eventually, they’ll get it, but if not, prod them a little more firmly. Say at the start of the reading session that you would like to hear some good expression as they read, and insist upon it. Also model good expression whenever you are reading aloud to your child (which you should do every day!).

Comprehension does not come easily to some children. The best way to encourage comprehension as they read is to ask questions as the story goes along. In the beginning, since the stories are so basic, the questions might seem inane or just plain dumb. But just because it seems obvious to you doesn’t mean that the child grasped it - it could be he was concentrating so hard on reading accurately that he didn’t pay attention to the meaning of the words. Ask questions after every reading session and explain anything your child doesn’t understand. As reading skills improve, so will the comprehension.

Resources

The Bob Books are great for pre-schoolers.

A Beka Book also has excellent readers for young children in their K4 and K5 curriculums. They have a lot of overlap, too, as far as ability and level of reading, so if you get a complete set, you’ll have lots of options for every stage.

Modern Curriculum Press has sets of readers that are organized by the different types of phonics sounds the children will encounter in the stories. These are more advanced, though. Very good for advanced K4 students later in the year, or for K5.

Primary Phonics Readers are very much like the Bob Books, and excellent for young students.

McGuffey’s Primer is a classic that is best for K5 students. It moves pretty quickly, although it starts out with very basic words.

The Victory Drill should be started as soon as a child can easily read CVC words. You can follow the instructions that come with the book or you can devise your own method of using it. At any rate, have the child read through portions of it every day. At the beginning, one column will suffice. As they get older, they’ll be able to read an entire page in a minute or less.

Explode the Code - I have heard very good things about this program, but I don’t have personal experience with it.

Phonics Pathways - You could probably teach reading with just this book alone. An excellent resource!

Other posts in this series:

Phonics-Phonics, Part 2-Reading-Reading, Part 2-Handwriting-Math-Days of the Week-Bible-“Other”