Home Education Part One: Teaching Kids How To Read

**This is the first part of a four part series I am doing on how you can accelerate your child's education.

No matter WHAT school your child goes to it is ultimately our job, as parents,  to advocate for the best education we can for them. Letting that be said, we choose to put our daughter into public school - hoping to partner with the teachers for the best possible learning experience for her.

We do NOT home school our child but do interact with her and create mini "learning opportunities" in many of the things we do. Simply teaching a child how to read can open up doors for them and make the rest of the subjects fall in to place...it also gives them increased independence as they can read and follow directions without constant coaching.

Miss Sarah has been reading since she was two. She is now five and reading at a third grade level. If she makes a mistake on a word early in the sentence, she corrects the rest of the sentence to compensate...she reads without using her finger and has full comprehension.

 I mention this not to brag, but to point out that this program I am going to talk about WORKS for the basic ground work, and followed with your interaction.

My Friend Trish was selling Usbourne Books at the time and strongly suggested I get the program that they were able to sell at the time: Your Baby Can Read. (They no longer carry it). I am SO thankful that she encouraged me to get it and do it!!!

We did the program as it suggested and breezed through all of the steps...it WORKED! 
It combines the popular sight word technique that most schools use and phonetics - so kids actually learn how to sound out words that they don't know!

But what came next?
Where do you go from there? No one seemed to have answer - even the children's librarian, LOL!

We then created our OWN flash cards and has computer clip art on the back...that we even used at restaurants for "busy time" while we were waiting for our food to come.

Then we pulled out the "Dick and Jane" primers from my childhood - she blasted through the entire collection in less than a week...then came Dr Seuss, again - easy! 

Our library has books for early readers marked with blue tape, red tape and green tape to differentiate between the harder levels...she can read them all and we are now on Chapter Books, with some adorable picture books still sandwiched it (the illustrations are SO amazing!)

Naturally, this makes it easy for us to review other kinds of books like science, geography etc...but we will cover those in a few weeks.
=)

If your peanut is young enough (4 or younger) you might want to look into this program yourself - it's easy to do and really can give your kiddo an edge. Check it out on Amazon here (cheaper than going with the infomercial deal). I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have...I seriously can't recommend it enough!