I am teaching my two year old twins how to read.
One thing we're starting in the next week is going through this book: Teach your Child to read in 100 easy lessons
These are some other things I will be doing to teach them how to read. We're just on the first phase right now. As we progress and I am able to teach them more, I will describe what I am doing.
1. Learning phonics and words
Phonics is the relationship between the letters and their sounds.
We have large colorful letters posted all over the house and we review how the letter sounds (rather than the name of the letter). It doesn't take long for them to memorize the letters this way. Beginning with lower-case letters is useful because they are more common.
We watch the Leap Frog DVDs which my boys love. They have learnt about letter sounds and how letters go together through watching these DVDs.
We do a lot of activities which focus on the letter sounds. Although letter names are important to know, at this stage letter sounds are more important for them to know if they are going to read.
We are also using flash cards to learn the letters. These I bought at the Dollar Store.
We're starting with high frequency letters (such as S and T). Vowels are introduced after every 6 letters or so. Then once they know a few letters, we're stringing them together to form basic words: sat, tan, set, and so on. When they are ready, we will also learn the necessary sight words.
Then the aim is to read collections of words in both word lists and passages consisting of regular words and sight words. I have got the Bob Books for them to use for that.
2. Phonemic Awareness
This is the ability to hear and manipulate the smallest units of sound.
We will be learning to isolate the sounds in words as well as count the phonemes. Rhyming is a part of this as well.
3. Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read quickly and automatically.
4. Vocabulary
This refers to the meaning of words.
This entails building a repertoire of known words as well as having the skills to decipher new words.
5. Comprehension
Comprehension is understanding what one is reading.
We are going to begin this by doing a number of things: asking questions once I read a book to them, identifying main themes for theme, and making use of their prior knowledge.
