Hi, I have been showing my baby words for some time now and he knows quite a few, do I keep adding more words or how do I go about starting books with him, what I have been teaching him to read to date has been nouns and verbs. I haven’t taught him the words: I, we, are, is, at, on etc etc. What do I do next? He can say some of the words but uses baby sign language for the rest.
You can start using Preschool Prep Company series “Meet the Sight Words”.
I posted about my experience here.
http://learningmorethanever.blogspot.com/
Hope it helps!
I would start showing him couplets so that he learns to read longer phrases gradually and also learns to read left to right. Some children also need a gradual decrease in word size before they are ready to read books. There are two thoughts in teaching the sight words (the short words you listed) - one is to teach them directly as flashcards which is what I did with my eldest child. The other is as you introduce short phrases you teach them with the words they already know - if they know “dog” and “barking” you teach them “the dog is barking” and so on and they will automatically learn “the” and “is” Either method will work just fine so choose the one you are comfortable with. Do not stop showing more words however as he probably still needs even more new words and these new ones need to be added as individual words too.
The phases of the reading program do overlap. Once your child can read many words you can introduce couplets or short phrases. They will learn many words this way, even if they do not know them prior to seeing them. You can always keep introducing new words while adding sentences and books. I had sentence strips and would right things such as:
Gabriella likes to have tea parties.
My name is Gabriella.
I am a girl.
We would point to each word as I read it to her. I also pointed to the text in books and that was enough. You can also play games with the flash cards where you make sentences out of several cards. My kids enjoyed this because they would make sentences that made no sense and I would laugh and tell them that was hilarious. Get some sight words flashcards, MonkiSee has some big ones, teach the sight words and then start making sentences. It is a lot of fun. You can see more here.
http://www.monkisee.com/sight-words-flash-cards.html Scroll down and you will see what I mean. I taught my daughter over a 100 sight words in a few weeks. I would flash her between 10 and 20 words as fast as I could. We did this twice a day and in less than 5 days she would know all the words. We moved on to sentences and books and now she reads just about anything.
My son was in about the same position as your child. Lots of nouns and signs at that age. We bought the “Meet the Sight Words” DVDs and books, and within a few weeks, he was reading sentences. He could read the “Meet the Sight Words” books when he turned two. After that, we didn’t do much more instruction - just read to him every night. Now he can read almost anything, but still prefers for me to read to him.