Mommy, Teach Me to Read!: A Complete and Easy-to-Use Home Reading Program

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Reading—the Great Adventure

1. Little Ones, Language, and Love: Birth to Two Years

Reading Tips

Book Recommendations

2. Learning to Read the Natural Way: Two to Five Years

Reading Tips

Book Recommendations

3. Exploring Language: Five to Seven Years

Reading Tips

Book Recommendations

4. Language-Based Studies: History and Song

5. Happy Endings

Appendix A: Magazines

Appendix B: Comfort

Appendix C: Red Flags

Appendix D: Rethinking TV

Appendix E: Where to Find Books

Appendix F: Stuttering

Appendix G: Make Your Own Sandpaper Letters

Appendix H: Correct Letter Formation

Appendix I: Lefties Need a Little More Thought

Appendix J: Helps

Bibliography

Contacting Barbara Curtis

Notes

Guide

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents

Page Numbers

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

Copyright © 2007 by Barbara Curtis

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-8054-4477-3

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Dewey Decimal Classification: 372.4

Subject Heading: READING \ HOME SCHOOLING

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Other version includes KJV, The King James Version.

For every mommy

busy building our cultural heritage

one story at a time.

Acknowledgments

ONE OF THE GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF my life has been teaching children to read, as well as teaching parents to teach their children to read.

I am so grateful to the Washington Montessori Institute—where I received my training—for equipping me with a simple and effective approach to reading that worked so well for me as a teacher.

But what I never could have guessed back then was how beautifully it would work when I taught my own children to read at home. Half of my twelve are grown-ups now, but I treasure memories of them curled up with books, choosing wisely and eager to discuss what they were reading. I'm glad they love to read, but I'm doubly grateful to have been part of launching such an important and rewarding part of their lives.

I'm also grateful to B&H Publishing Group for this opportunity to share the things I learned as a teacher and applied as a mom—thus equipping even more parents with the tools they need to give their children a successful start in reading and to discover that same sense of accomplishment and joy.

A special thank-you to my editor, Zan Tyler, for promoting this project and trusting me to deliver. And thanks to my wonderful and supportive family for sharing Mommy for a little while.

Waterford, Virginia

September 2006

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS INTENDED AS A companion volume to follow Mommy, Teach Me! while the first book presents an easy-to-use preschool curriculum in all other areas, language is what you will find here in the pages of Mommy, Teach Me to Read!—a parent-friendly approach to speech and reading development from birth to seven. You will also discover a preschool approach to history and singing, since these are language-intensive subjects.

Mommy, Teach Me to Read! is based on my second book Ready, Set, Read! first published in 1997. The content has been updated and expanded because—well, frankly because I've been continuously updated and expanded! Expanded not only through ten more years of mothering, but through ten years of using the Internet as a communications tool. My blog www.MommyLife.net has for the past several years kept me in close contact with mothers of preschoolers, whose questions have stimulated and challenged me, adding to what I have to share through my books.

The Internet is a blessing for all of us who are looking for ways to help our children reach their potential and allowing God to help us reach our own. With a multitude of resources available, part of the help I want to offer you moms is to search out the best so your time will not be wasted with your computer instead of your kids. The minute my book titles were secure, I purchased the domain name www.MommyTeachMe.net. Anyone who reads either of the Mommy, Teach Me! books will also have access to a dynamic and jam-packed resource, offering links to teaching supplies and online support. A real bonus is the templates for materials such as sandpaper letters, phonetic flash cards, and other language exercises you will find described in these pages. For mothers who are more often than not Lone-Rangering it with young children, this will be an important support as you begin to make the most of your child's preschool years, the years when it is truly easiest to teach children to read.

Throughout the text, when you see the icon apple , that is your signal that there are more resources, information, or support at the Web site. Keep in mind that the information flow there is two-way, so if you come across resources you think should be included, I'm only an e-mail away.

Please know that I am not the kind of expert who thinks my way is God's way. I simply share what I was taught and what worked for me. If you don't have the time or energy to make use of every single idea presented in this book, that is not cause for discouragement. Just do what works for you, feeling free to modify and combine with bits and pieces you pick up elsewhere.

One other small but important note for readers: I'm asking my readers to please understand my use of the word he in the very old-fashioned way it was intended—as a pronoun covering all individuals without regard to gender. It is not a slight on women or daughters—after all, I am one and have four of my own. I just want to focus on the task at hand and not be stumbling over words.

Now, let's begin!

Reading—the Great Adventure

YOU CAN DO IT! YOU CAN teach your children to read. You can open the gateway to a rich, rewarding adventure that will beckon them on for the rest of their lives. You can set their feet on the path to a lifelong love of reading.

Through teaching your children yourself, in an informal and loving way, you can control the momentum, drawing each child closer to reading at a pace tailored to his own individual needs. You can anticipate your children's trouble spots and give them extra encouragement when they need it, thus diverting feelings of inadequacy or failure, which make for unmotivated readers later on.

Your investment will build in each of your children eagerness and self-confidence—making every realm of knowledge as available as an open book. In addition, your involvement in their first efforts will nurture a love of words and ideas that will boost your children's potential for success—no matter where their future finds them.

Teaching your child to read may sound like a tall order for an ordinary parent. It isn't. Since the first hieroglyphics, most children who learned to read learned to read at home, taught by their parents. This resulted in some charming and intimate teaching methods, as when Hebrew parents baked cakes in the form of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, requiring their children to name the letters before they ate the cakes. Parents wrote words with honey for the child to read and lick from a slate, that the words of the law might be sweet on his lips.

Reading was not a compartmentalized task that one had to leave the home to learn, but part of the family bond—parents and older siblings passing on the keys that would unlock the secrets of the books the children had been hearing read aloud for as long as they could remember. Reading was part of a natural flow in the development of the child.

In the United States, two factors brought about a change:

the advent of public education, originally intended to extend literacy to every child, and

our modern emphasis on specialization and the resulting public perception that learning occurs only in a certain building between specific hours by designated teachers.

Both these factors have eroded parents' confidence in their ability to teach their children anything—particularly reading skills. For decades we have left the most important part of our children's education to the professionals, giving them credit for being better equipped to teach reading than we are.

But are they?

Consider the current state of affairs:

According to the ACT (formerly American College Testing), only half of the 1.2 million high school seniors who took the 2005 test were prepared for the reading requirements of a first-year college course.¹

Colleges today routinely offer remedial courses for incoming freshman who failed to master material formerly required to graduate from high school.

In January 2006, the National Survey of America's College Students found only 40 percent of the nation's college seniors are able to distinguish fact from commentary in a newspaper editorial or to understand instruction manuals.

In August 1996, President Clinton announced the America Reads Challenge and pledged 2.75 billion dollars to ensure that every child could read well and independently by the end of third grade—a dramatic mandate that leaves me wondering how it was that at one time almost everyone used to read in first grade.

Numerous expensive reading programs sell like hotcakes to worried parents who sense their children just aren't where they should be in school.

It doesn't sound as though the professionals are really better equipped at all!

That's because in the past few decades, public education has turned the reading realm upside down. Educrats (a term for educators in policy-making rather than teaching positions) arbitrarily replaced a consistently successful teaching method with something more modern—the whole language approach to reading. Now we are reaping the negative rewards of this failed experiment.

Didn't anyone notice that the traditional approach was producing the desired results? Perhaps they should have remembered the maxim If it works, don't fix it.

Phonetics First

What worked in teaching