Reading Rules

I posted last year about how I teach my children to read. If you missed that post, or maybe you weren't in that phase yet, you can go back and read it here. Here are the highlights of the resources I've used:

• "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" by Siegfried Engelmann
• "Bob Books" by Bobby Lynn Maslen
• Starfall

You can read about each of these resources on my original post. All of these resources may be available to you for free through the library, though if you have more than one pre-reader, I would recommend buying them because they are worth their weight in gold! The Starfall site is free for anyone to use online.

Once your children are reading more and more and sounding out words on their own, it can get tricky to remember the rules, especially the ones associated with the vowels. As I've taught my two oldest children how to read, I've learned a few rhymes to help them remember how to sound out some words. Some I learned from the free computer games at Starfall in the "Learn to Read" section. Here are a few we use on a regular basis:

• When two vowels go walkin', the first vowel does the talkin' (boat, steam, rain)
• The silent "e" makes the vowel say its name (kite, name, vote)
• Y can be a vowel when it says long "i" in my and try, or "e" in lazy or crazy.
• Lonely vowels at the end of a word say their name. (me, she, go, no)
• Does the "c" say "s" or "k"? At the vowels we take a look. With e, i, and y use "s". With a, o, and u use "k". (ceiling, cite, lacy; cake, cook, cucumber)
• And for spelling with c or k: "K" before i and e, "c" before the other three (a, o, u). (kind, keel; can, could, cute) (This last one is from Carley!)
  

I'll also be doing a post soon on rhymes to help children write their numbers, so stay tuned!