[OT] Teaching a child to read
I'm teaching my 4 year old, Rosemary how to read. I thought I'd share a few of my experiences in case it's helpful to others.
On a friend's recommendation, I'm using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It's phonics based, and it's pretty foolproof. It uses a special orthography to simplify the complexities of pronouncing english words - each symbol makes one sound:
It looks weird, but it abstracts the illogical nature of the english language a bit at the beginning, then removes the crutches once they're used to the idea of reading. It's working really well for Rosemary - I tried teaching her with refrigerator magnet letters before, but it just didn't make enough sense for her. The systematic lessons are geared for young children and have been working very well.
I've read some people's strong opinions that this method will ensure my child's illiteracy, and potentially induce a magnetic pole flip. All I can say is it's working well for us, so I'm not to interested in the Ph.D. educator bickering.
I've been surprised that the concepts aren't the hard part - the hardest part of reading is paying attention. We actually repeat that before and during every lesson: "the hardest part of reading is paying attention." Children are wired for rapid learning, but it's hard to sit still for 20 minutes.
Bribery helps. I've used a mixture of bribery (a little bit of candy or sugarless gum), goals (trip to Chuckie Cheese every 10 lessons), and artificial scarcity ala GMail. The artificial scarcity has been probably the most effective, which cracks me up - the bribery and goals weren't doing the trick, and Rosemary was losing interest. So I started hiding a few of my dry cleaning tickets around the house, and I told her the reading lesson people had a new rule that she could only have a reading lesson if we sent in three tickets. All of a sudden, she was scouring the house for tickets every day, searching for tickets. It's turned into a bit of a game - I hide them in her dollhouse or next to her cereal bowl when I leave for work in the morning.
This has been challenging, educational, and fun for both of us. Rosemary is very proud and excited to read the little stories at the end of each lesson, and watching her sound out her first sentence felt like watching her take her first steps.
And I've become conscious that the hardest part of learning - for me as well as my four year old - is paying attention.