Learning to read

Learning how to read can be hard. Teaching your child how to read can be even harder. Where do you start? How do you choose the right books for your kids? 

As a Kindergarten teacher I have two different approaches I take. If your child does not know all of their letters and sounds I start with pattern books. These are books that repeat the same pattern every page except for the last word. The picture on each page will help your child figure out what the last word is. For example, “I like ______” would be the pattern and each page would have a different object. “I like apples. I like bananas. I like grapes.” This allows your child to feel the success of reading and build their confidence while they continue to learn letters and sounds which will enable them to sound out words down the road. Reading pattern books also allows children to learn sight words (common words in print that often can’t be sounded out and must be memorized such as the, like, we, etc). They can also start looking at the first letter of the last word to help them figure out what the word is as well.

If your child does know their letters and sounds then we work on reading “cvc” books (consonant-vowel-consonant, such as cat, pop, mat, etc.). However as a teacher I have found the cvc books on the market to be incredibly boring. I have always wanted to create a series for kids learning to read that was a little more exciting than what is currently available. I created my first book “Mat and Nat”, a story about two unlikely pals, a rat and a cat, who find a magic carpet that takes them to different places in their community (Kindergarteners learn about their community in social studies so we are killing two birds with one stone here!). Children learn to read and tell stories not only through words, but through pictures as well. My idea was to make the illustrations more engaging and to tell more of a story so children could do a lot more interpreting and reading besides the simple three letters words on the page. Hopefully this helps make these books more exciting for kids (and grownups!) Check out my first book on amazon. All you need is the kindle app or a kindle to read :) And stay tuned for more books to come featuring more vowels and sight words!