A Reading Genius : How My Five-Year-Old Read Harry Potter All the Way Through

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Dec 15, 2004

Those who know me best know that there is one accomplishment in my life as a homeschooler that always makes me smile - teaching my oldest daughter to read at four. In actuality she was reading small words like cat, bat, and rat at three, but she was really a bookworm at four-years-old.

Although I am not considered a veteran homeschooler by some standards, I can say that what I have learned in the time since I first began homeschooling - which incidentally was at the birth of my first - has worked.

When my oldest daughter, now six, was born I read to her every single day, without exception. Of course, she had no interest in the stories early on, but as she grew older she gradually began to pay more attention to the stories, was able to tell me what the stories were all about and was eager to read the stories herself, although at the beginning she wasn't really reading at all. But in her mind she was a master storyteller.

By two, she had already finished learning the letters and by three she had grasped the letter sounds to perfection. As my daughter was growing and developing from a baby I always used every opportunity to teach her the alphabet. For instance, if we were in a store, I would teach her the letters by showing them to her on price tags. Or, if I was reading a magazine, I would also give her a magazine along with a highlighter and have her highlight all the g's on one page, for example. Or all of the s's on another page. It soon became where she was hightlighting all of the the's on a certain page, or all of the when's. Doing exercises like this made her feel like a big girl and thus she was more apt to learn.

The trick that made learning her letter sounds extremely easy was I would play an audio cassette of the sounds over and over as my daughter played in her room. We were given Hooked on Phonics as a gift and it truly proved useful in our phonics program. By playing the audio version of Hooked on Phonics, all of the letter sounds eventually stuck in her mind and became simple for her to learn. By the time I sat down with her to do our phonics book lessons, it was a piece of cake.

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