We have a Make-A-Word card game. I'm having an issue though. I don't have the faintest idea on how to teach my preschooler how to read sight words or to read at all. Does anyone have any pointers or suggestions to try? Thanks.
Reading aloud to them is the best idea. I love love this book on the subject: Read Aloud Handbook
It also advocates putting on the captioning on the TV and for any movies/DVDs you allow your child to watdch.
Other things we do is sound out words like pan, can, etc. I also love the Usborne First Reading Series. We have this and use it about 3-4 times a week when reading stories to our daughter. PM/msg me if you want more information on this one.
I was just going to reccoment the read aloud handbook! I love that book. :)
What are your motivations for teaching reading? Are you planning on homeschooling beyond preschool? how old is your preschooler? Preschoolers are not typically taught to read. Even reading in K is a relativly new thing. I would look at your reasons to for wanting to teach reading right now and then take a good look at your childs development. Make sure she is truely ready to learn to read. there is NO harm in not teaching a preschooler to read, but there can be harm in trying to teach a preschooler who isn't ready to read.
My current preschooler is 2.9 we work a lot on readiness skills. She read stories every day. we read stories with predicatable text and I allow her to fill in the missing words always praising her for "reading". She regualrly sees the adults and older children in her life reading. She is given a lot of time to "read' books on her own. She is allowed to pick her own books out from the library. I have the close caption set on the tv. She does not know all of her letters yet. I talk about letters as they come up and she uses starfall.com K level, but i have not really actively tried to teach her letters.We read rhyms and sing songs, but she is not ready for rhyming on her own or playing other words games. We work on visual skills by doing a lot of picture searches while we're reading. "can you find the spider on this page?" or whatever. I have a hunch this paticular child will be an early reader, but I could be wrong. i thought my oldest would be and she was very resitant to learning to read even in K. (she loves reading now BTW in third grade :) ). So who knows.
This is why we used Hooked on Phonics. Phonics always came naturally for me but I had NO CLUE on what order to teach things. I figured HOP would show me what order to teach in and then I could use whatever other material we wanted to supplement. I got a phenomenal deal on HOP thanks to someone posting a link here on CM (that was a long time ago).
You could also try progressivephonics.com You have to register but it's completely free.
I love School Sparks for advice on how to introduce my 4yo ds to new topics. They have an entire section on Dolch sight words flashcards plus articles with tips for introducing sight words. Then if you hunt around in the letter/word awareness section of their kindergarten worksheets page, you'll see they have sight word bingo and sight word sentences which my 4yo LOVES! I tried to link to each of these sections so you wouldn't have to look too hard, I hope this helps! You can just hunt around their general "kindergarten worksheets" page if you want to find other stuff -- they have a lot.
Thanks. Those are a lot of great ideas. I'll look into them.
How long is your preschool day?
- barnwell84
on Oct. 2, 2011 at 5:15 PM