The cat sat on the mat

I don’t really remember learning to read. It seems to me as though I always knew how to read. I could read already when I started school and got annoyed about having to say the sounds of letters instead of the names while everyone else was learning. Apparently, though, my mum did actually teach me – in a very similar way to how she taught lots of teenagers and young adults to read years later (which you can read about later today).

It strikes me, though, watching Rosemary negotiate this phenomenal task, that it’s quite a hard thing. OK, some children pick it up very easily and quickly, with little help (I know of children who have suddenly started pointing words out to their parents, without anyone ever having attempted to teach them how to read – though I don’t know of any such children who haven’t been surrounded by books and read to many times a day). Generally, though, we need some kind of help to start us off on this journey into the wonderful world of books.

At Rosemary’s school (as with most schools in the UK) they use phonics and, in particular, the Jolly Phonics scheme. This seems to have worked excellently at starting the children off. I think one of the benefits is that it combines different styles of learning – as well as sounds, there are pictures, rhymes and actions. The children all seemed to love the actions when they started. For the most part, they’ve progressed beyond the actions and other elements now, and have moved on to blending sounds and also on to sight-recognising tricky words as well as learning various letter combinations (such as ai, oo, ee, ll, ng, etc. etc.).

Rosemary started off brilliantly – really enjoying learning new sounds and taking to blending very well. But then she suddenly seemed to reach a block, which appeared to be mostly to do with the school books. She became very distracted and, after reading through whole books quite quickly, went to only reading one or two pages at a time, and taking half an hour to do so. She started expressing a reluctance to read the school books – claiming they were too boring. The school books are mostly those from the Oxford Reading Tree, though there are a few others. The later books do get more interesting (incidentally, does anyone know where the magic key came from?) but, to be fair to her, the early ones are a bit dull, especially when she’s used to being read much more exciting things (she finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets tonight, for example, and has been read most of the Roald Dahl books – more on this on Friday’s Children’s Book theme).

We’ve had some success in moving her forwards by just forgetting about the school books for the moment (though they’re still reading them at school with her, of course) and going for something quite different. The series I picked was Usborne Very First Reading, which is quite new and which had seen some pretty good reviews. I think there are a couple of things that has made this series work particularly well for Rosemary – the first is that the early books combine text for the adult to read and text for the child to read (you take it in turns) and the second is that most of them rhyme. They also have modern and lively illustrations and most of them have a decent story. The combination of longer words for the adult to read with the simpler ones for the child to read means that they can get a bit more plot in there than they otherwise might. The books are also based on the phonics methods, introducing new letter combinations in each book – the one she’s currently reading, for example, has lots of ‘ing’ and ‘ong’ sounds in there. We’ve also been using reward charts to help motivate her a bit, which has worked quite well.

Keep reading today for more posts about learning to read, including tips from people with experience in teaching more than just one person to read! If you have your own stories about how you learnt to read or how you’ve helped your child learn, we’d love to read them – comment below or write your own post and leave a link. I’ll be doing a round-up at the end of the day and will include any links to relevant posts.