Homeschool World Forum

busymum · User Joined: 29 Jun 2006 Posts: 2 Location: New Zealand

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!
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Theodore

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.
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busymum · User Joined: 29 Jun 2006 Posts: 2 Location: New Zealand

Thanks for the tip. Any recommendations on good pre-school phonics curricular or is it unnecessary?
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Theodore · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:58 am Post subject: Phonics program recommendations:

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.
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June R Oberlander · Moderator Joined: 20 Oct 2005 Posts: 5

There is a preschool resource published recently in New Zealand called "Fun Start". Published byExisle. This book contains weekly developmental activities for parents to use with children from birth to age 5. The fifth year of activities contains initial steps of teaching phonics.

Tabz · User Joined: 06 Feb 2006 Posts: 89

That's really cool! Smile

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 Very Happy

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robinsegg · Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 8:38 am Post subject:

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
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tahirabs2 · User Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 4

One EXCELLENT book to use when the child is atleast 4 (decide when you think they are ready on ow) is Teach Your Child to read in 100 Easy Lessons! This is just an AMAZING book.. it tells you just what (kindof) things to say to your child as you do the short 20 min. lessons, it teaches reading/writing/and recall all in one 20min lesson AND you can start with any lesson you don't HAVE to start at 1 and you CAN stop at any lesson you don't have to stop at 100! Smile

Ceres · Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 12:42 pm Post subject:

My son wanted to learn to read at 3, so I understand. We actually liked the "LeapFrog" DVDs. They start by teaching the kids the letters and what sounds they make. There are now 5 DVDs, I believe - one is for math. He was reading short sentences before he turned 4, so I guess whatever combination we did worked. Now our next son, who is also 3, is asking to learn and our almost 2 yr. old likes to watch them too.

We didn't just have him watch those, BTW - we did a lot of letter/sounds/short words flashcards too.

Good luck!

Theodore · Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 5:00 pm Post subject:

We dug out some of our old stuff today, and came across a book Mom put together for us to learn our letters with. Each page has a clearly stenciled capital letter and small letter, and we got to help Mom add pictures to each page (P is for penguin) to make it easier to remember which letter was which. I remember penguin because I wrote it down as panguin at the time Smile

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The board game has sold over 350,000 copies worldwide, garnered many awards, is used by over 2,000 schools, and is used extensively by homeschoolers.

jlotfi · User Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 1

I'm new to this site.

An excellent resource I was just turned onto is www.starfall.com

they've got interactive computer activities to teach phonics and letter recognition. There's a bunch of downloadable worksheets and mini-books.

amird · User Joined: 13 Jul 2007 Posts: 17 Location: Israel

we love starfall too
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Melenie · User Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Posts: 11 Location: NC

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!