A Reading Genius : How My Five-Year-Old Read Harry Potter All the Way Through - Page 2
© Jennifer James
One of the aspects of teaching your children to read is that you want it to be as painless as possible. Teaching your children to read should be fun for both you and for your children. By utilizing the audio aspect to teach my daughter the letter sounds, I was able to let her play while also enriching her mind and priming her to become an early reader.
Thinking back at what I liked seeing in my classrooms as a youngster, I also bought huge letters to go on my daughter's wall which I placed at her eye level. Her room was surrounded by the alphabet and as she played, she constantly and consistently heard the sounds spoken to her and saw the letters and numbers -- I bought those too -- around her.
After I introduced the alphabet to her, I never once ceased reading to her. It was always our nightly ritual to read together at night and then right before she fell asleep we would recite the alphabet and the letter sounds.
The first book that my daughter read was "Go Dog Go". It was a great book to start an early reader on because of the easy words and the repetition it employs. She would read other easy readers, like Dr. Seuse and Sesame Street books. It wouldn't be long before the easy readers were far too easy for her skill level.
I monitored my daughter's progression well. We continued to do our Hooked on Phonics lessons, and I really let her take the reading on by herself. As an independent learner, she wanted to read the stories by herself and would ask questions about how to pronounce this word or that. She gradually progressed in her reading and by the time she was five-years-old, she had read one Harry Potter book all the way through.
My daughter is now six and has read three Harry Potter books and is a third way through the fourth. She read "Charlotte's Web", "Stuart Little" and "The Trumpet of the Swan" in a week's time each. And she reads the encyclopedia and anything else she can get her hands on every single day.
In all, what really made all of this work was the connection I made between my daughter's learning style and how she would best retain information. For all homeschoolers, this is a critical aspect of homeschooling -- you can tailor your child's learning around their stengths and also bolster their weaknesses.
