What can I do? My child child is not making progress in reading?More and more parents are finding their child in this situation. You are far from alone. The teaching of reading has been made so complicated, so that you can be made to feel helpless, unless you have hundreds of pounds (literally) to get your child assessed and help obtained. Sadly, even then, your child may only receive a label with little or no help to actually solve the problem. Help is at hand. I have taught hundreds of children to read over the course of over 30 years - of all ages and abilities. I know that it does not need to be complicated. For many children, they only need more structure to their learning than has been given to them at school - plus a programme that can go at their pace, not one set by a classteacher/school/governmnet department/etc.. On my FREE reading programme, Reading Made Simple, I show you how easy it can be to help your child I do not mean that it will not involve much patience, or learning on your part - learning how your child learns, how best to teach in a way that encourages rather then discourages, and so on, but one that lays out a simple programme that you can use to go at your child's pace and that gives you a simple lesson outline that you can follow each day, for just a few minutes before or after school as as part of your home-school lessons. FREE Reading books for reading interventionAs well as our FREE decodable reading books for children who are just starting out, or who have a special need, I also have a series of books for older children who may need to go back and revisit the early stages to build reading accuracy and fluency. These books were written for my older pupils, some of whom had started secondary school before they cam to me for help. Assess what your child can doBefore we find help for your child, the first thing to do is to assess where the problem has arisen. I do this through a simple testing activity that even you can do. When you know where your child has come unstuck, then you can work to rebuild and strengthen the 'wall'. See learning to read as building a house. First a child must learn the initial sounds - the sounds that each letter of the alphabet stand for. Then they must learn to put those sounds together to make words: c-a-t: cat! Once this skill is mastered, they must be able to blend four sounds - word with a consonant blend, like s-w-i-m. These stages form the foundation for reading and it here, in the foundations that I usually find 'cracks' or even 'holes' in the wall that are causing a child to fail to make reading progress. This post will tell you more. A little daily structured help may be all that your child needs. And you can become the expert - and saver £££££'s! Other may need a little more digging and help is provided here. Decodable reading books for reading interventionI have a growing series of decodable reading books for reading intervention.
What is special about these reading intervention books?In my work with older reading 'delayed' children I find a commons symptom, once the intial foudnations have been checked thoroughly, to ensure for example that a child knows the initial sounds and how to blend them to make words. GUESSING has most often become the child's main strategy. This becomes obvious when you find a child confusing words that look very similar, e.g. tip and trip. These books deliberately include these words multiple times to force the child to think about the whole word, not just a part. In short, these books have been written as I have helped REAL children - not by an academic with a literacy degree, but no real working knowledge of how children learn. CVC Words
Consonant blendsBasic common sounds with 2 or 3 letters togetherThe following books have been written to match Level 2 of Reading Made Simple. If these are too hard for your child - do not fear, simply do Level 1 instead, and find a complete set of reading books for you to use with your child.
Keep moving through the Reading Made Simple programme and your child will make progress. Purchase the bundle for a low price: click belowAt last, just what you have been looking for! A professionally written set of totally FREE, levelled phonic reading books, for parents to use to help their child to learn to read! Written by phonic specialists, these books take children from the earliest stages of decoding to reading fluency. Simple to useThese books have been written for Reading Made Simple, where FREE, easy to follow instructions are provided to help you to teach your child to read - simply!
Built in successUnlike many phonic reading books, these books build in success as they only use decodable words for which the child has already been taught the phonic sound and a few sight words which are gradually introduced. These sounds and sight words are then revised again and again as reading book follows reading book. Constant revision and repetition of words helps children to relax knowing their are no nasty surprises. Cheap to printThese books print n black and white just as well as colour making them budget friendly compared with $5 a book new, or $1 in a thrift/charity shop. SAVE, SAVE, SAVE and still give your child the best reading instruction. What these phonic decodable books DO NOT contain
We have endeavoured to create little stories, with a touch of humour where we can, which will set children up for serious, thinking reading later on. We do not believe that the gift of reading is purely to entertain, but as a means of learning about the world around us. Therefore, they are not 'silly', or fantastical, as we want children to live in the real world as thinking people, not a virtual one where their minds can be easily controlled. The Reading BooksThese book bundles are all available for FREE from my store on Teach Simple, where I get a small royalty every time someone downloads them, so enabling me to provide more FREE resources for all to use. If you see other paid products in my Teach Simple store that you would like, please pop over to my TPT store where you can purchase them without subscription. Initial Sounds 'reading books'These are the first books in our series of decodable reading books. They are intended to be used while a child is learning the initial sounds.The process of learning to read begins with learning the sound that each letter of the alphabet stands for when it is at the beginning of a word. We call these beginning or initial sounds. We help children to lean these through s simple daily programme. You can find out about it here. CVC decodable reading booksThe next set in the series is a set of 16 CVC levelled phonic reading books, taking children from their earlies attempts to blend the simplest words such as c-a-t, to reading simple sentences made up of such words, and the sight words: a, is, the of. The characters are introduced throughout the series - farmer Tom, his animals, the dog and cat, and son and daughter, Sam and Pam. Children love these books because they can read them. Starting with the first book where the child simply reads 'a cat', to the last book where they read of Jiff making a mess, children feel their skills developing. The set is accompanied by a set of five workbooks which help to consolidate learning. Instructions for teaching this stage can be found here. Consonant Blends reading booksOnce the child can blend three sounds, we teach them to blend four. Instructions for doing this can be found here. Once again, these books have matching workbooks to help learners to progress as quickly as possible. Common Sounds Level 1 Set 1The next stage is to learn some new sounds, made when two or three letters join together. In the red level series we teach the sounds: ck; oo; ee; sh; ch; th; ng; ing; ar; and or. The children feel secure as the stories carry on telling more of the adventures of the characters they have come to love added to which they meet familiar words, already met in the the pervious two levels. This means that reading fluency can start to develop. If you need help teaching these sounds, we tell you a simple method for doing so here. There are more books in the series, although not yet packaged into bundles and you can find them here. Silent 'E' Words level 1 Set 2Next in the Reading Made Simple reading scheme, we learn the silent 'e' rule and learn to decode words like: cake, time, smoke and tube. If you have a struggling reader we have you covered too. Find out more here.
Reading books are a tricky subject. If your child is at school, the books sent home may baffle you and confuse your child. This is not unique to your school, or your child. Help is at hand! Many parents ask: If the school is teaching my child to sound out words, then how comes s/he can not sound out the words in the books sent home? The answer, simply put, is that ideally each phonic scheme (e.g. Letters and Sounds) should have its own unique set of reading books, which match the order in which the sounds are introduced. Some do - but as far as I am aware, Letters and Sounds, used by many schools, does not. Therefore the schools often use a hotch potch of books from several schemes and group them into colour coded 'bands'. Most usually your child is given free choice from the colour band s/he is assigned to, depending on current ability. This is, from my point of view, not helpful to the child learning to read with phonics who needs a book that has words that can be sounded out - at the child's level. Why are schools satisfied with this? Well that is another story, but in short - many teachers still believe that phonics stilts reading and they hope that by using 'whole word' reading books that the child will have the best of both worlds. It doesnt work like that - it just leaves many children bewildered. No real need for reading books to start withHistorically, schools used graded reading books in conjunction with a look and say approach. These books at least had a controlled vocabulary and the child learnt words by memory, then learning enough to put into sentences and eventually in to paragraphs and more. Ladybird still sell a scheme that is popular. They gave children confidence, but children with any difficulty learning to read hit memory burn out at some point and their reading skills top-out. Phonics is by far a better method by which to learn, but each scheme must then have its own unique set of reading books. Reading Made Simple has its own set of FREE to download and print reading books. If you have a struggling reader who has so far failed to learn to read with phonics, then I can only suggest that you use my programme and reading books. It is proven to work where others have failed. How to use the school's reading books to best advantageIf the school has given your child books like Biff, Chip and Kipper of the Oxford Reading Tree, and they have learnt pretty much to look at the pictures and memorise the text, then gently start to draw the child's attention to words that can be read properly. The names themselves are a good place to start. If you think the book is beyond your child's ability, then simply read it to him/her and spend the rest of the time practising phonic skills. Don't let your child memorise the text! Remember, reading is taught by means of a systematic phonic programme, which eliminates guesswork and not by 'look and say'. Guessing is not the reading strategy you are taught it is: rather it is the road to illiteracy, Do not be fooled. A scheme at the end of the day is a means to an end. It builds up gradually until the child is a fluent reader. Modern schemes these days tend to put great emphasis on understanding the story. Alright, if you haven't got a clue what you are reading about there is not much point reading it! But to be honest - if you read books to your child and do things together, then you will have no need to worry about comprehension too much at this stage. It will come naturally. Often schools focus on the comprehension as they are making such a mess of actually getting the children decoding. Children need a strategy for working out what words say. Guessing doesn't work! Think of learning to drive - or any other new skill. At first you have to learn the skills and all your attention is taken up with them. Clutch down, change gear, lift clutch as accelerator is gently pressed down... phew that was a job thinking about it! Only when you have had a lot of practice does driving a car become gradually, more and more second nature so that you do it without thinking and concentrate on reading the road. So with reading. We need to understand why we want to learn - to see the end in sight so it's good to do all the things I said to give the child the idea that reading is worthwhile and good. But before s/he gets there, there are the skills to slowly learn and build up. Yes, do talk about what the child is reading to you, but make the actual 'sounding out' the main focus, until reading becomes automatic, when the child will really start to enjoy reading. To that end, phonics for reading needs to take as little as time as possible. You can have a child with a reading age of 12 by age 6 Schemes can be dull to some, but a life-line to othersMost children at this begining to read stage like to feel they are reading a book, but as this early stage passes quite quickly you don't want to spend lots of money buying special books. Some children will find a scheme helpful, others will find it dull - you know your child best. Find books with simple print and see what happens - get the child to read the words they can and you read the words they can't and gradually they will be able to decode more and more. If you would feel happier with a scheme then I highly recommend my own decodable phonic reading books on Reading Made Simple, which start with books with just CVC words, (like cat and dog,) building up through the basic sounds. Sight words that cannot be sounded out are introduced slowly. Reading Made Simple has its own reading booksOur books are all phonetic and can be sounded out using the phonic knowledge that has been introduced prior to the book being recommended. They will not work with other Phonic programmes unless you have carefully checked to make sure that your child knows all of the sounds needed to read each book. You can easily check this information. They are short booklets that can be printed in either colour or black and white. They can be found here. Have you see our FREE phonic reading scheme?Give your child a head start in reading today! |
WelcomeHello, I'm Lilibette, qualified teacher (B.Ed Hons). I have taught phonics in mainstream education, followed by have home-educated my two sons to 18, and am now a private tutor. Categories
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