Starting the Reading Journey

Lately, I’ve been thinking that I should start Noey on the journey to reading on his own.

2 events that happened over the past week have led me to that conclusion:

DD was taking photos of Noey in his room when he (Noey) sauntered over to his Papa and stopped at the lens cap on the floor.

“C-A-N-O-N”, he said, spelling the word out loud. “Ca…ca…ca”, he said, making the sound of the letter “c”. “Ca… Camera!” he declared.

DD applauded him for the good attempt.

******
We were reading Noey his Bible stories at bedtime, and after we read many stories, we declared story time over for the night and closed the book. My book-loving son was distressed. “You can flip through the pages yourself for a while, Noey”, I said. “Everybody can read the words. Only Noey cannot.” he said sadly.

Since he appears to be interested, I figured it was time to strike while the iron is hot!

The question is: How should I teach him?

From what I understand, there are 2 aspects to reading — recognition of sight words and the use of phonics. Sight words are words which make up about 50-75% of words that are most commonly used when reading, and while some sight words can be sounded out phonetically, some of them cannot, eg. the word “know”, with the silent “k”. The emphasis in this case is on the recognition of whole words, as opposed to breaking them up phonetically. Phonics, as is well known, is the association of sounds of spoken English to letters or groups of letters of the alphabet. Through blending these sounds, words can read and pronounced.

Noey has learnt a handful of phonic letter sounds from the readers my neighbour passed on to me, so my inclination is to work on phonics with him first. I also have a personal preference to emphasise phonics because I didn’t learn phonics myself as a child, and I think my over reliance on word recognition has resulted in my rather poor spelling skills. My father tried belatedly to try to teach me to break words up phonetically but it took me a while, and even now, it does not come naturally. Still, I think both aspects/methods are important so I will be exposing Noey to both.

I was a little lost so I asked around for tips on where to start and got many helpful suggestions!

Here are some of the resources/tips I thought might be useful:

Sight/Whole-Words Method
1. Google Fry’s Sight Words, Dolch Work Lists, or Oxford Word List. There are plenty of suggestions and printables available. These words can also be printed on flashcards and taught, a few words a week.
2. Peter & Jane Books. These were books I used when I learnt to read and it’s kind of cool that they are still around!

Phonics
1. Starfall. I have not explored this website in detail but it seems to have plenty of online activities. I clicked through the ABC section where they teach letter sounds for the alphabet and I think it looks pretty good! Noey might be interested.
2. Bob Books. This is another series that has been around for ages and the emphasis appears to be on allowing kids to read a whole book by themselves by slowly introducing new letter sounds, using consistency, and repetition. They also have an iPhone app which I let Noey entertain himself with for a while. He seemed to enjoy it, though I’m not sure he learnt anything that one time!
3. Letterland Readers. Letterland is a popular phonics programme and is in fact the same one that the kindergarten that Noey will be attending uses. For that reason I think I will wait to see what they teach and use in school so that I won’t undermine what they do.
4. Montessori Activity Books. A friend suggested that I get these as they may be more tactile and interactive than just reading from cards or books. Sounds like a great idea — if I knew where to get any!
5. Leapfrog: Letter Factory DVD. This is a cartoon in which the characters are introduced to the different letters from A to Z and are taught the sounds that they make. It’s gotten rave reviews and would be great EXCEPT that Noey doesn’t like cartoons. But if your kid does, I think it would be useful!

I was also came across this blog which shares a lot of helpful tips: Phonics and Reading

If you have any other tips, do share!

I’ve decided to try a bit of everything and to see what Noey is interested in and continue with what sticks. For now at least.

So I picked up a couple of Peter & Jane books from the bookshop while on a grocery run. Noey was much more interested in the pictures than in the words, as I expected! Hah. I let him familiarise himself with the books and in between, I taught him the shorter words.

“G-O, go!” and “U-P, up!”, he says.

I guess that’s good enough for now!