How I Taught my Children to Read

My husband and I never really set out to home-school our children. Much like parenthood, it was something my husband and I decided on when the time came to make decisions. I was not naturally nurturing or had aspirations of becoming a mother growing up. In fact I had a distinct aversion to children as a young adult and vowed never to have children of my own. The funny thing is, when I turned thirty, a little voice inside me whispered that I was going to become a mother very soon. And I did. After many weeks of prayer, my husband and I had a serious talk and we decided to become parents. Our first child was born a few short years later, four months before my thirty-third birthday. This was also how we ended up homeschooling our children. As our daughter approached school age, we again sat down to have a serious talk and we made the decision not to send her to institutionalised schooling.

My previous post, entitled ‘The Beginning of our Journey’ (https://www.casadeperegrina.com/post/the-beginning-of-the-journey), talks about how we started homeschooling and explains briefly what the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education is all about. In the Charlotte Mason paradigm, children begin formal instruction no younger than six years old. Even though we did not officially begin formal education until the Little Miss was six and a half, I decided to begin teaching her phonics when she turned five.

During this season in our family life, we were living in Queensland at the time, I was running a handmade children’s clothing business called Peregrina SMALL (you can still visit my Instagram @peregrinasmall and Facebook account under the same account name). In order for me to design and produce my one-of-a-kind pieces, my two little children got their share of YouTube viewing and they watched a lot of ABC songs and nursery rhymes. By the time my daughter was five, she already knew all the letters of the alphabet and their corresponding sounds. Taking the advice of my mother-in-law, who is a retired educator, I ordered a few items from the phonics program of a homeschooling provider called Light Education Ministries (L. E. M., lem.com.au). I ordered the phonogram cards and the first few workbooks in the program. We started learning how to read the day our order arrived in the mail.

I learned how to read using phonics as a child publicly educated in the Philippines. It made sense to me to teach my children in the same way. Phonics is a method of learning how to read and write by understanding the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters or groups of letters (phonograms or graphemes). Because my children were already quite proficient with the basic sounds corresponding to each letter of the alphabet when I began teaching them how to read, it only took about ten minutes before they were successfully reading simple C-V-C (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. Twice a week, my daughter and I would clear her little drawing table and put away all her sketchbooks, markers and crayons, and we would sit together for about twenty minutes to learn a new phonogram. We would practice writing the phonograms, learn their sounds and practice reading them in words. Little by little, she started learning how to read longer and longer words. At first we used a very simple set of readers to practice her reading skills. When she finished reading the ten volumes, I bought more readers from L. E. M. which she found very boring. In fact, she only read three stories from the first volume. We put away the readers and moved on to picture books, all from the Ambleside Online (A.O.) Year 0 curriculum (https://www.amblesideonline.org/ao-y0-bks).

The first book she read out-loud all by herself was Robert McCloskey’s ‘Blueberries for Sal’ followed by Helen Bannerma’s ‘The Story of Little Babaji’. Once the picture books became too easy, she moved on to chapter books which was when we started Term 2 of her first official year as an A.O. Year 1 learner. The first chapter book she read was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ which was followed by Johanna Spyri’s ‘Heidi’. By Year 3, she was reading almost all the books in her curriculum.

I taught my son pretty much the same way I taught my eldest. Master Z got the hang of reading even quicker as he had been watching and listening and sitting in during lessons long before I actually sat down with him with my trusty phonogram cards. He didn’t even finish reading the basic ten-volume C-V-C readers before he complained of boredom. A quick search on-line led me to discover the Treadwell Readers (https://archive.org/search.php?query=treadwell+reader).

These readers from the early 1900s are great for beginner readers. The stories and poems are interesting and the level increases in complexity which is enough to challenge beginners. I printed them out and stitch-bound them with some yarn and card stock for covers and handed them over to my six-year-old son. He read through three volumes in rapid succession. He looked forward to reading practice every day and genuinely enjoyed the stories and rhymes.

He then moved on to Arnold Lobel’s ‘Frog and Toad The Complete Collection’. He loved this collection and sped through the short stories of friendship and camaraderie between best friends, Frog and Toad. He also read through the picture books from our little library of living books and moved on to chapter books soon after.

I got him to sit down with me one afternoon while I was putting books in my shopping cart and asked him to help me find books that he would like to read after lessons, during his free time (they have a daily reading time allotment of thirty minutes to an hour). He asked me to get him the Dolittle books. He had finished listening to the audiobooks and we had originally thought that there are only two books about Doctor Dolittle: ‘The Story of Doctor Dolittle’ and ‘The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle’. But we found out that there are actually thirteen books in the series and we found all of them in a four-volume set, ‘Doctor Dolittle The Complete Collection’. I was very surprised that he asked for the entire set (it’s a HUGE collection!). He started reading the first volume the day it arrived in the mail.

Both my children are currently still using the phonics program from L. E. M. There are nine modules that start with phonics all the way up to spelling and grammar. Once my children became proficient readers, which happened while my daughter was in the middle of module three and for my son it was halfway through module two, we would use the workbooks as fillers on days when I’m having to do some serious juggling between my two learners. And also when they ask to do it. As Charlotte Mason learners, workbooks are not a big part of their education. We only use them occasionally for phonics and for arithmetic.

I focused on teaching my children how to read because I believe that it is a necessary skill not only in life but more specifically in our homeschooling journey. We read a lot, and I mean a lot, of books using the Ambleside Online curriculum. One particular mother using the same curriculum, out of curiosity, counted all the books from Year 0 to Year 12 and concluded that if a child completes the entire curriculum from beginning to end, that child would have read over 700 books before they even start university. Learning how to read has made my children become more independent human beings, in their learning journey as well as in their day-to-day lives. The process was not instantaneous nor was it easy. We started off slowly and with a lot of patience from the learner and the teacher, we built our confidence. There were days when it was difficult and days when we were frustrated but with consistency and discipline reading just became a regular part of our routine. Thanks to A.O. and numerous other homeschooling blogs, I have been able to find the right books for our home library that continue to engage and delight my little readers.

If you are a homeschooling parent yourself or you’re teaching your child how to read, what resources have you found helpful and what method have you found successful?