Homeschool World Forum

Hi, I have a 2 1/2 year old girl who wants to learn to read. She knows all her colours, numbers, shapes, and letters, and can match two identical words to each other. I have been doing some simple crafts with her recently but she is not very interested in them so yesterday, on a hunch that she wants extending in the letters/words area, I wrote a few slips of paper with "blink" "jump" "sit" etc on them. I told her what they were, muddled them up, and each time we picked one out, she would tell me what the word was and we would act it out. We started with just two words but it grew to 8 very quickly. Now she knows all 8!

I do want to homeschool her but I wasn't expecting to start this early LOL. Any suggestions on where to go from here? I thought we might make a book together after a week of playing this "game" and each page says "I can jump, I can sit, etc".

Thanks!

It may appear that she learns faster with words rather than phonics, but she'll quickly get to the point (maybe a few hundred words max) where it's simply too hard to remember all the words. She has to be able to see the words as sound patterns and translate them into speech before she'll be able to read using anything approaching a large vocabulary. Your approach isn't necessarily bad in and of itself, but you should focus primarily on teaching her how to sound out words by recognizing letters and dipthongs (letter pairs that make a different sound) and the basic pronunciation rules. Once she can sound out any word, sight recognition will develop many times faster, and her vocabulary will be able to expand to any size.

It's probably a little early to be worrying about a formal phonics program. For now, just point out letter sounds and letter pattern sounds, and have her sound out some of the simpler words in books you read to her. Once she knows all her letter sounds, you can transition into a formal phonics program that will cover all the more complicated things like "I before E except after C, or when sounding like A as in neighbor and weigh".

As for what phonics program to use, there are some phonics resources listed here that you can look over, and we've also used the phonics program Sing, Spell, Read & Write with my younger siblings.

That's really cool! I would continue to read to her, and get her books that have simple word/pictures. When you read these with her do the phonics as you're reading it outloud so she gets used to the idea that you sound words out. You might feel a little silly but it'll imprint on her mind

We use one called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and it's worked great. Just remember to only do what's fun for her at this age, and that she probably won't be able to do any of the writing. 100 Lessons start with a couple of sounds and goes through phonics pretty thoroughly.

Also, you can label everything in your home at her eye level. Put a sign on everything: "chair", "table", "door", etc.

Rachel

We used Letteroftheweek.com, Starfall.com and the Letter Factory from Leapfrog to teach DD letter recognition and sounds of letters.
Now that she has a firm grasp on letter sounds we are starting to read basic first readers together like Bob books and I point out words in our normal reading and daily life that she is able to sound out herself. From here we will continue reading together until DD is ready to move on to more advanced books, then I will either use "100 easy lessons" or something similar.

Personally I think at 2 1/2 any formal phonics program maybe a bit ambitious, but then children are so different you may want to try it and see how she does. I would not spend any money on it though untill she knows basic sounds.

Good luck and have fun!

Do you know Letterland? They call it "child friendly phonics" and it's exactly that! It's the best book to learn letters and phonics in my opinion, I used it as a child and use it with my children now. I think that what you're doing is great and it's true that there will come a point where it's hard to learn more words so knowing how to read and sound out letters is more important than recognizing words right now, but it's great that your child is so eager to learn! Sounds like you're doing a great job.
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