Teach Your Child To Read with an
Effective Reading Program

Would you like to teach your child to read? Perhaps your child is struggling to learn to read at school. Or they have shown an early interest in learning to read before it is taught at school. Maybe you have decided to homeschool your child.

Whatever the reason for wanting to teach your child how to read, you may have reservations about whether you are really capable of doing it. You are not trained as a teacher and you know from bitter experience that trying to teach your child anything often ends in tears. Yours and theirs. What should you do?

Fortunately help is at hand. There are many reading programs available which are specifically designed to help you teach your child to read.

In choosing a program, think first about the delivery format you wish the program to use. This is generally a question of whether to choose a simple handbook describing the steps you should follow to teach your child, a multisensory program incorporating interactive teaching materials or a computer-based on-line program.

Then think about what type of instructional approach suits you. Broadly speaking, this boils down to whether you want to follow a program which adopts a phonics approach or not.

Keep reading to find out more about these different options.

Delivery Format

Handbooks describing early reading programs offer a simple, low cost, gimmick-free, tried-and-tested method to teach your child to read. Most of these books contain detailed step-by-step instructions of exactly how to teach your child. You play an important role in the teaching process and, although these books do contain ideas for games and activities to keep the learning fun, you are the prime motivator of your child.

If you feel that teaching from a book could be a little dry, you could opt for a more structured program. Multisensory phonics reading programs use interactive teaching materials to keep things fun for your child and appeal to different learning styles. These programs come with a range of teaching materials such as workbooks, DVDs, levelled reading books, posters, flashcards, song books and progress charts to hold your child's interest and motivate them to learn.

Another alternative worth considering is one of the fee-paying online reading programs. These might suit you if you think your child would not respond so well to you as the teacher, since the computer effectively does the teaching. Many children already associate the computer with playing games, and these programs utilise fun and engaging activities to help keep your child motivated while learning to read. I can recommend the Reading Eggs and Looney Tunes ClickN READ Phonics online reading programs.

Perhaps you are just looking for occasional extra reading tuition, to supplement what your child is receiving at school or address a particular problem area. In this case, consider one of the recommended free reading programs, which are still of an excellent quality.

Instructional Approach

Most of the recommended programs are phonics reading programs, which teach your child to read using the various correspondences between letters and the sounds they represent. The phonics instructional approach varies between programs depending on how the letter-sound combinations are represented to your child.

For example, in synthetic phonics approaches, children are taught to link an individual letter or letter combination with its appropriate sound and then blend the sounds to form words. In analytic phonics, children learn similarly spelt words together in 'rhyming families' and are then taught to analyse new words to detect spelling patterns from the rhyming families they have learned.

If you don't want to follow a phonics program, alternative reading programs are also available, such as programs based on the Look and Say or Whole Language methods of teaching your child to read.

So don't despair. Choose a program you think will be right for you and your child and see how easy it can be to teach your child to read!