What is the effective way of teaching 3 years old to Read

Early Learning Teaching Your Child to Read
1

Hi,

Anyone keen to share the effective way to teach 3 years old to read? I would like to help my son to read when he turn 4. This is my biggest goal now.

I started teaching him to read when he just turned 3 this year. He is now 3yr 5 mth old. My way of teaching wasn’t very successful.

He is currently on weekly zoophonics class to pick up lettersound , watch leapfrog at least 3 times a week (as he is getting bored of it and been watching for more than 2 months) and teach him to sound out at night as he knew only 50% of the lettersound.

My aim is to get his lettersound right by end of Sep09. Then i will use progressivephonics with assistance of leapfrog letter words when i am out for working.

I find that phonics the easiest way to get him to read. Any comments please?

Meanwhile, He is exposed to
4 categories of BITS (40 cards) +
5 chinese words +
WINK to Learn English 2-3 lessons (1 lesson 10 words with 10 pictures) +
MAGIC English (this is a series of DVD with BIG words and interesting story + songs) +
2-8 story books daily+
Listen to nursery rhymes + stories

Do you think i have overdo it?

I find that he seems like don’t get to learn from Glenn Doman method. I never give up and still continually flashing to him.

Whatever BITs that i flashed before, he couldn’t recognise. Eg: Flashed 7 continents for 10 days 3 times daily. Then, we play games with 7 continents using the same cards. The result is ZERO. I tested him on other cards too with same result too.

Whatever he learnt was through many repetitions using traditonal method. Eg: i paste the words on the wall, get him to read 3 times daily and read lots of books about the words or pictures, point to him the real objects then he can retain and learn better.

Flashing words or pictures don’t work wonder for him. Why? Is it because of lack of explanation, not enough information to get him to retain the words or pictures that i taught him?

Anyone has the same experience?

Most importanly now is how shall i help him to read in a proper and effective manner? Is his daily activities too much for him?

Appreciate experience mummies opinion and comments.

Lilttle about him
My son was on 2 hours playgroup daily when he was 21 months old and i never read him story nor expose him to good educational DVD/CD. Everyone told me not to be worried. They will learn to read when schooling.

This draw my attention when i noticed he couldn’t express well even schooling after a year, he was 3 years then. I sense the seriousness and quickly checked on internet and found amazing methods and children who can read so well when they are below 3 years old.

Since then, i started him GD but without success.

He has very short attention span. Even got him to watch Barney, Hi-Five, Sesame Street was very challenging. He watched less than 5 minutes and scream again.

This was what i did in the past months
I flashed words in Peter & Jane (P&J) graded book to him, once flashed 15 times immediately jump to P&J book 1a. While geting him to read P&J 1a, i continued flashing words in P&J book 2 and 3 and some words that he watched from wink to learn DVD.

Day time

  1. Flash 10 English words (words from P&J) + 4 categories of BITS 2 times with 1 hour interval
  2. Watch Wink to Learn English 2-3 lessons 2 times day time. He is on Level 3 now.
  3. Teach him to read Peter and Jane a page 3 times with at least one hour interval. He hate it and had stopped for a month.
  4. Watch his favorite DVD eg: Magic English (stories with big words), Leapfrog letter factory-(knew 50% of it)
  5. listen to cd: nursery ryhmes, story , chinese poems.

Night time

  1. Flash same word cards + BITs one time
  2. Read 5-6 story books (english + chinese)
  3. do some assessment book, 0-4 pages depend on his mood. If he is cranky, never do at all. This assessment might be maze, mathematic 1-10, matching game.
  4. read chinese graded book, repeat words after me (1-2 times with 30 min interval). He hates this method.

During the 5 months of teaching, he knew the following:
a) recognise number 1-10, A-Z (upper and lower case), his name, about 20 chinese words, about 10 english words, basic shapes
b) recite 3 chinese tang poems with memory
c) know lettersound about 50%

2

Dear rabbit_chong,

It sounds like you have been doing a lot of work with your son. It also sounds like you have been getting pretty good results.

Are you having fun? I would continue whatever is fun for you and your son. Relax and enjoy the process.
If the processes is getting stressful or boring, I would try something else. These threads might help a little.

http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/how-do-you-teach-a-very-active-baby/
http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-child-to-read/my-17-months-old-baby-does-not-show-interest-in-flashcards/

It sounds like you know your son well. If you think you are doing too much, cut back a little.

P.S. If your son likes the computer, www.starfall.com is good for phonics. Someone also mentioned Meet the Sigth Words DVD, and my son really liked them and picked up on those words quickly. Each child is different. It think it is important for us to find what is fun for them and go “play”. :biggrin:

3

When my son turned three I backed off on some of the other aspects of the program and decided to focus on reading, writing and math until he was very comfortable in those areas. I personally felt it was better to work on these subjects in a few different ways everyday (and hence deepen his knowledge) then to try to broadly attack many subjects in a day. We still do encyclopedic knowledge but now I am finding library books on the subjects and read aloud time.

He is now about 3 years and 3 months and is reading short stories and sounding out words everywhere we go. I think what works is very dependednt on the personality of your child.
Here is what I am doing/did you may want to try some of it or not.

  1. When he was younger we did the “Letter Factory” that definately solidified his letter knowledge.

  2. Now that he knows his letters we focus mainly just on reading. Our main resources are:

    1. Reading eggs (This is an interactive online website where kids complete progressively more advanced reading and pre-reading tasks, at the end of every level they “crack open an egg” and get a creature of some kind that reinforces the phonetic rule learned. My son loves this game and sits on my lap to do it whil I control the mouse for him. There is a free trial and if you like it it only costs thirty something dollars for 6 months)
    2. Preschool Prep Meet the sight words (My son throughly enjoys these videos and learned to recognize the words given in each video in about 2 weeks. We reinforce these videos with flashcards of the words that we go through each day. The ones he gets right go in his pile the ones he misses go in my pile to be retried. Now that he knows them all we only occassionally review them or he “teaches” them to his imaginary students)
    3. The book “Ordinary parents guide to teaching reading” (My son finds this to be very tedious and boring and does not enjoy it so we do not do it as often as the other two activities. When we do it I make flash cards of the words for each lesson and put them in a notecard holder we have so he can review them when he does his sight words)
    4. We also do reading with me reading aloud some books and with him attempting to read some short books to me.
    5. Another great resource is “Word World” the TV show on PBS. It has a lot of word building and catchy songs. We TiVo it and then my son can watch it in the morning when he first gets up.
    6. We also do little reader, but we have not been as regular with it recently as he seems to be more interested in doing things phonetically right now.

So as you can see instead of doing the same thing (ie word cards) every day, we try to do one or two reading activities a day. This way we are working on skills, but he doesn’t get bored. Hope this gives you some ideas.

4

Have you tried out the new Pattern Phonics sets that come with the new LR curriculum?

Also, when the Semester 2 curriculum is out, it will come with many stories, and we’ll also be releasing more and more stories in the near future, so hopefully that will also keep him interested!

5

My older son will be 3 end of this month. Has the same problem. Started teaching him after 24 months so far no luck. I keep getting very frustated. Gave up GD math after 29 months. He loves Leap frog, learnt his alphabets and sounds from that. That’s it. Gave GD words.
He loves listening to books when I read to him. He sits 2 to 3 hours with out moving. I am very surprised about it.

I will try your ideas Linzy. How are you teaching Math? Can you give me some ideas.

6

KL, we’ve done the pattern phonics and that does reinforce the same words he’s using, but I am reluctant to just jump ahead because I like him to get the exposure to the vocabulary in the non-phonics section so I haven’t really jumped ahead to where he is phonetically. Hence the pattern phonics where we are in the program now is not quite advanced enough for him.

Heath, for math we use a combination of the Kumon workbooks, math games and Right Start. We recently bought Right Start Level A. We are moving very slowly through it. It is relies on an abacus and focuses on mental math and visualization. It has been a little hard at the beginning because he had already started using counting strategies to solve problems and now he is trying to relearn with instantly recognizing numbers up to 5. It probably would work well with people who have had success with their children instantly recognizing numbers through Doman’s methods. It also comes with Math games which are card games that the program uses instead of drills to reinforce concepts.

7

Thank you Linzy!

Kumon is not online right? Yesterday I used Reading Eggs and it is awesome. Thanks for recommending it. My son really loved it. How many times do you do each lesson? Do you do it like 3 times a day and on the second day do you go to lesson 2?

I will check out Right Start.
K to you.

8

We usually do the reading eggs once a day. My son is really into “cracking the eggs” so sometimes he wants to do multiple lessons at a time. Then on subsequent days I will go back and review particular lesson segments he had problems. The Reading Eggs people recommend repeating each lesson 3 times, as it builds automatic word recall, but my son seems to get bored with that so we do them once if he understands it and if he doesn’t we do the parts he didn’t easily get at the beginnning of the next lesson until he gets it.

As for Kumon I just use their workbooks ($6.95), I got them and Barnes and Noble. We have the number, letter and cutting books. My son actually knows his letters and numbers so alot of it is just working on the fine motor skills of learning to write them all. However after writing the numbers (1-30) is mastered then the first book moves on to matching numbers with objects, writing how many numbers they see, filling in the missing numbers, and number puzzles. After the first book the second one works on numbers up to 120. The third is simple addition. The forth general addition. The fifth and sixth subtraction. The seventh simple simple multiplication.

The cutting book invlves cutting out progressively more difficult shapes/objects many of which can be used for small games or as a mobile, etc…

Hope that helps.

9

I found montessori method of teaching very effective.
Initially my daughter had difficulty recognising alphabets but now she can make out first and last sounds easily.
I also found lapbooking effective.
I refer to the thread on lapbooks and am making lapbooks for each alphabet one by one. this reinforces alphabets for them.
Starfall is amazing though my daughter finds reading eggs boring as it is slow and we cant skip an activity if we are bored.
Garima