Here’s my story.
What I thought I knew about teaching reading turned out to be incomplete. My real education began when I taught my own children, and it fundamentally changed how I approach literacy instruction.
I did go to college for a degree in Elementary Education. But I do not remember them teaching me how to teach reading. They might have, but I already had the mindset that you had to teach students phonics or they would not learn to read. This was because my church started a Christian school when I was a teenager, but my little brothers were in preschool. The school used A beka curriculum, which was heavy on the phonics instruction. I helped teach some of the prek classes and I helped my brothers do their homework. I knew I wanted to be a teacher, so I paid close attention to how they were learning to read. So I learned how to teach reading using explicit phonics.
After graduation, I taught prek, 4th and 2nd at a private school, all abeka.
I used to say that the kids could read, but they hated it.
I knew I wanted to homeschool my future kids and my goal was to teach them to read in a way that they enjoyed and were good at it.
I knew that it would be essential for me to read aloud to them from the very beginning.
Along came my 4 kiddos. When the first one turned 5, I found what I thought was the perfect curriculum. It turns out, it was not what she needed. It just did not work. I continued reading lots of books to her and learning about what was in the books. But she was not ready for reading. Eventually, she qualified for Language therapy due to an auditory processing disorder. The therapy mainly consisted of a program called LIPS, which works on recognizing sounds in words and eventually being able to blend and segment them in words, essentially reading. She was homeschooled and her therapy was her school. The sessions were almost 2 hours, twice a week. When she was done with therapy, she was exhausted from the hard work she had done. On the other days, we did the homework from her therapy. So I learned a lot about the program and the importance of focusing on the individual sounds in the words.
Kiddo number 2 seemed to learned to read by “osmosis”. I was working so hard with number 1, that he absorbed enough of how the code works. I am sure I showed him some as I was reading to him. And I do know that I spent some time showing him how reading works, using real books and a notebook and pencil. At then end of his kindergarten year, I gave him a phonics test to see what he was missing for kindergarten. It was just a few things, so I taught him those specific skills.
With Kiddo number 3, I thought I finally get to teach a kindergartener with an amazing curriculum. It was based on a letter a week and each week had a theme, like “a” week was all about ants. After a few weeks, she looked at me and said” Mom, I don’t want to learn all this stuff. I just want to learn to read.” So, that is what we did. She completed the phonics and writing the letters portion and by Christmas, she was reading on a third grade level. I was amazed, because before we started, she didn’t know many of the letters or sounds.
Before kiddo number 4 turned 5, I became an educational therapist with NILD and learned about The Blue Book Method. It is an associative keyword approach, with sounds and letter combinations and some spelling and ending rules. The keywords help students remember the patterns represented by the key words. I decided to use this with her. We got about halfway through the book and by then, she was reading. It was not necessary to do more. I also used Handwriting without Tears and of course continued lots of read alouds. And we were doing unit studies and I might have added a few other things.
With all four of my kids, we used books like Explode the Code after they started reading, but most of their reading progress came from reading authentic texts. I would listen to them read and help them if they came to a sound they did not know.
Once my kids shifted to reading to learn, rather than learning to read, they went on to explore vocabulary, grammar, poetry, literature studies, and writing through different curriculums and structures. My favorite ended up being the Michael Clay Thompson curriculum.
Now all four of my kiddos are grown, and they are excellent readers who love reading. Through teaching my kiddos, I learned so much about teaching reading. I discovered it requires direct instruction at the beginning and grows through reading authentic texts, including corrective feedback from a knowledgeable adult.