A friend or two have asked me for advice on teaching their children to read. I feel singularly unqualified to answer these requests, because, although my two oldest do read voraciously, I can’t really remember what I did with them. I did go through most of The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise, along with various sets of phonetic readers and magnetic letter boards. I also downloaded all the sight word charts from www.janbrett.com and played word bingo and any other little game I could think of to help them learn these high-frequency words. But the one thing that helped more than anything is motivation. We provided that through three ways:
1. Provide lots of high interest books that make them want to read, especially non-fiction. These are the books that answer “how or why” and shows them that books aren’t just for stories but can answer their questions. Obviously most of these we read aloud at first. Some favorites in this category are/were:
- any of the Usborne beginners series (subject specific volumes on Vikings, Romans, Ballet, Frogs, etc.)
- Usborne Puzzle Planet/world series
- DK Eyewitness books
- Word books (Richard Scarry, Usborne 1001 Words)
2. Read aloud, all the time, story after story. Our favorites:
- 20th Century Children’s Book Treasury (great for trips when you don’t want to bring a lot of books along)
- The Big Green Pocketbook
- any by Robert McCloskey
- many by Patricia Polacco
- any by Jan Brett (Hedgie is one of our favorites)
- Mr. Putter and Tabby series
- Phoebe Dunn’s Little Animal series
- Angus books by Marjorie Flack
- Shirley Hughes Alfie books
- Mike Mulligan and others by Virginia Lee Burton
- any by Eric Carle
3. Listen to audio books when you can’t be reading to them. This teaches them the sounds of our language, especially big cool words! Use the ones that have the page turning signals for helping them learn that the whole story doesn’t happen on page one. The library has many, many audio books, and lots of e-audio books now. Favorites:
- The Winnie the Pooh stories read by Peter Dennis. Hands down the absolute best reading of these stories. Worth buying if you can! This is perfect for long road trips or just a run to Meijer because the stories are short and self-contained in each chapter. No one else captures Piglet’s personality like this reader.
- Hank the Cowdog stories (if you have boys—girls not so much)
- Story-telling CDs by Jim Weiss
- Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, told by Geoffrey Palmer
