You Can Do It!

To a parent, teaching reading may seem like a formidable task to undertake. You may wonder if you are really qualified or where and when to begin. That's why I'm working on these pages! To let you know that teaching reading IS something YOU can do! It's not a hard mysterious process that requires a certified teacher (you didn't have a teacher come in and teach your baby to laugh, and crawl, to walk and talk, right?) or a 100 dollar program or game. This site will aim to give you most of the tools you need to get your child onto the road to reading and you the confidence to teach it!:)

Our Quick Bio

It all started with Hannah. My first baby who at a little over a year and a half said, "Mommy, teach me read dose abc's." I had NO idea where to begin! I went to the library and stumbled onto the following book "Teach Your Baby to Read". The information inside was inspiring and informative. I followed the "program" as outlined in the book by getting out posterboard and markers, made word cards and we "played" our "reading game" (more info about Glenn Doman and his Institute's programs to come soon!) She loved it. It wasn't long and she could recognize many of her cards. Alot of the words she couldn't pronounce yet but could read and demonstrate her knowledge of them. As she got older, I checked out more books and learned about the different "methods" of teaching reading. I began to teach Hannah phonics at the age of 3. In about 6 months she could read anything. The Bible, an encyclopedia, the newspaper, whatever! I have taught her very little reading wise since then and at the age of 8 she has been tested at a late 8th grade level in language arts. She is a voracious and excellent reader! My son Brian has followed in her footsteps but at a slightly slower pace (his love is math!). He is 5 and reading at a 2nd to 3rd grade level. (He's a wiggle worm and doesn't take as much time as sister did to sit down and hit the books but just recently is finding a love for the written word that just might match hers :) The baby, Benjamin, is currently doing flash cards book and has a sight vocabulary of approximately 20 words at 12 months. He even read aloud off of a menu the other day!

The Different Methods

Basically there are three methods of reading instruction: Look Say (i.e. Dick and Jane), Whole Language/Literature approach and Phonics. From my extensive reading and research I have come to the conclusion that Phonics is the best approach to reading (*note: for babies it does appear that the whole word approach as outlined in Doman's book is effective. Babies brains and attention spans, preferences, etc. are wired a little differently than an older child's. You can always teach them phonics later if they have not "intuited" the rules and patterns of phonics over time on their own).
There is much controversy on this issue, with most educators/schools choosing the look-say and whole language methods (with "incidental" phonics). I don't think I need to tell you that most American students are severely lacking in the reading department so apparently this isn't working worth beans! If you want to read more on the subject, a good book to read to get an understanding of what the whole fuss is about would be "Why Johnny Can't Read" and an excellent phonics resource is "Phonics Pathways" that talks a bit about it all in the introduction.