I talked about my goals in my previous post, and one of the goals is to teach my daughter to read before the year 2021.
She’s turning 6 next year, and I know I shouldn’t pressure her to read, and I didn’t, but she’s just ready. We have been reading to her daily since she was 1 month old, and continued to do so. At the age of 5, she already has large vocabularies and reading readiness skills.
So after her 5th birthday, and after setting my determination to teach her to read, I started by making a lot of dua’a/prayers that Allah will make it easy for her to learn and easy for me to teach her. I even said the prayer aloud before she go to sleep each night so that our goals are aligned (okay, I’m one psycho mom). But I truly believe that only Allah could ease the process, or any process for that matter, and our kids need to know that we would put our reliance on Allah in everything.
I first introduced her to sight words using flash cards. I know you might think that I should have teach her using phonics, but I really lack the knowledge to teach her using that method. She learnt phonics in school, she already knew the sound of each letter, but she didn’t really understand on how to blend the letters yet. Hence I taught her using the method I know, which is by teaching her the whole words or ‘look and say’ method (that was they way we were taught). To my surprise the progress was quite fast, she could quickly recognized words like and, go, to, so, no, on, of, off, at, the, is, it, in, and if.
I started to buy Peter and Jane series for her to read then. She took quite some time to master book 1a, 1b, 2a, and 2b, but by the time she was on book 3a, she was also getting better at blending words using phonic methods (thank you, teachers), so book 3a, 3b, 4a and 4b were a breeze for her, alhamdulillah. Now she’s on book 5a, and the progress is slowed down since there are many complex words introduced, for example, station, school, horses, houses, police, etc. I let her to take time.
Aside from Peter and Jane, she’s also now reading phonics through Read Easy beginner series, since she already have the basic and can self-learn, so all I need to do is just cross-check her reading.
Now, we also incorporated spelling test to her routine, and due to her competitive nature, she loves it and wouldn’t accept if she spell things wrongly, lol. We have also move to reading encyclopedias to her instead of the children books, since she wanted to learn in details about animals, trees, and other countries (yes, she’s obsessed with the atlas).
Alhamdulillah, she’s still in the process to inprove her reading but I’m just happy with her progress so far. Still a long way to go for both of us.
So if you ask me, there’s no right or wrong method in teaching kids to read, but the most important thing is for them to develop the love of reading and understand why reading is so important in life. For now, we are just happy with her interest in learning, alhamdulillah. I keep making dua’a that she’ll always be eager to learn and seek knowledge.
x
JEEZ, JAZ 