Teaching Children to Read in Home School

"As soon as your child has mastered the letter sounds and the alphabet and you have your word notebook ready, you can start working on their first words. First words as I said before should be always simple consonant, vowel, consonant or just vowel consonant. Such as cat, of course everybody loves to start with that and dog and pan and pin but you can also do the two letter ones which are very important. In, at, is, and as many others as you can think of. These are your first words. What I do is on a notebook like this I'll skip lines and I'll fill up one columns and two columns, maybe three columns depending on how large you write and then I'll have the child go through and sound out each word. Maybe we'll start with just one column the first few days. Once they master that column, go maybe fill up a whole page. This is the most basic with these simple short vowel sound words. Make sure that you don't put a word in here like was, because even though was is consonant, vowel, consonant, the a does not make an aa sound and we're just teaching the basic vowel sounds which are called short vowels A E I O U. A makes what you would say would be a u sound in that case. So was is not a word we put on here. We'll talk about that later. But think of as many words you can possibly think of and just keep adding to this list and have the child start at the beginning and practice this everyday and even if it goes for pages, after a while they get very fast at it and it's a lot of fun. But in the beginning let them work out each word carefully and let them sound it out and again covering the letter as they learn."