Whether you are home schooling your child, or simply an enthusiastic pro-active parent who wants to give their child a head start, here are three very good advantages to teaching your child to read at home.
One-on-one tutoring
When a child learns to read in a class, they will be sharing their reading teacher with about 20 other children. This means that in a 30-minute lesson, your child will be getting one-on-one attention from that teacher for about one minute.
Now consider that if you teach your child to read at home, they will be getting your full, one-on-one attention for the duration of their lesson, be it for 5 minutes or a whole hour.
This personal touch ensures phenomenal success in the shortest possible time.
Keep them interested for much longer
If a child is forced to read anything that does not interest them, something that should take 5 minutes to learn can take you an hour.
My son balked at the idea of singing rhymes, and although many books offer reading content that is good for teaching the sounds of words, things like “Zac is a rat” and “the cat sat on the mat” not only did not interest him, but actually turned him off reading for a long time.
However, when I started to include words into his reading lessons that he liked (things like aliens, werewolves, trolls, bugs, etc) he was suddenly very interested in his reading.
When we bought books for him to read, I allowed him to choose his own books. His very first books were on Winnie the Pooh, and he would read them all the time without any encouragement from me.
By teaching your child to read at home, you have the power to ignite the spark of reading in your child and to turn this spark into a blazing inferno.
If your child loves what they are reading from day one, reading will become a passion that no-one can take away from them, not even a very dull school syllabus.
Avoid the reading wars
By choosing to teach your child to read at home you can avoid the reading wars altogether.
What are the reading wars you ask?
Well in most English speaking countries the school system and other educators are engaged in a great battle over whether it’s best to teach a child to read using phonics (sounding out words) or sight reading (look-and-say).
Fortunately for the home schooling or home school preschooling parent there needn’t be a choice.
A child needs both methods to achieve perfect reading ability.
By using the sight reading (look-and-say) method first to ignite your child’s interest in reading and to build their confidence and then by introducing phonics (sounding out words), your child can be reading by themselves in 4 months.
When your child is keen to read and sits reading without any prodding from you, then you have finally succeeded and they will be readers for life and you do not really need to know any more reasons why it was such a great idea to teach your child to read at home.