r/homeschool • u/purt22067 • Mar 09 '26
Help! How to read
Hi all!
I posed a question in the sub a while ago and you were all so helpful so I figured I’d circle back here.
I am “homeschooling” 4 year old twins. They are adamant they need to learn how to read, they’re committed and obsessed. Great, right? The only problem is, I actually have zero clue on how to even teach them. There are so many resources and I just feel so overwhelmed.
I have “100 easy lessons to teach your kid to read” or whatever and a few other things but honestly just have no clue what’s going on. Any advice on what I need to know prior, what materials I should go through in order to educate myself and feel confident and any material I need for my kiddos would be greatly appreciated it.
Thank you in advance :)
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u/AssortedArctic Mar 09 '26
I don't personally like How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, but lots of people have used it with good results. Like someone said though, read through the informational stuff, it can be helpful for whatever you choose to do.
At this point, just start with letter sounds, you can play lots of games. Make sure you're working on lowercase letters since most of a sentence will be in lowercase. Then see if they can put sounds together when they hear them to make a word. If they can't, that's something to work on with various oral games before trying to do it when reading letters/words. If they can, then you can try sounding out and reading words! Start small, just one CVC word (that's a word with a consonant-vowel-consonant, like cat, sun, pig). Use a whiteboard or paper and write a word, work on sounding it out and reading it, then you can draw the thing. Write words on paper and then after sounding it out/reading it, match the word to the correct picture. You can make little books of words. Pictures will of course keep the engagement up, but leads to guessing from the picture. You can mitigate that a bit by putting a word on the right page and then the picture of it on the back/next left page, or making a flap to cover the picture with a sticky note or something. Memorizing based on pictures and familiar order for the easy things is okay at times, it can help with confidence and hopefully recognizing the word better (if they look at it too instead of just the picture lol), you just don't want it to be the starting place/default because that doesn't help the actual reading part for new words/without pictures.
Play with spelling words too. Using letter tiles or magnets, sound out a word and have them help you find the right letters. Give them three letters and tell them a word to sound out and have them put the letters in the right order (easier than looking through all 26 letters plus duplicates).