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Teaching Your Student to Read

Literacy rates in America have dropped so drastically that college students are attending class without being able to read. High school students can't read! College students cannot read! Public schools have not fixed the problem and how they got to college without being able to read is because public schools have totally failed our students! They cannot read because they haven't been taught how to sound out words because they haven't been taught phonics. Unfortunately, even if students can sound out and pronounce the words, they have no clue what the words actually mean. There are videos on YouTube proving that high school students, or even college students cannot read -- some not even at the sixth grade level!

What happened to our students' literacy levels? The government's capitulation (ask your high school senior or college student if they can read and define the bolded words on this page: I dare you) to America's most powerful teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Whatever the AFT wanted, the government has red-lighted and given them carte blanche and turned a blind eye to what has happened to the students under this leftist organization.

Here, in Brevard County, FL, there are two websites I found that show that Brevard County's reading scores for public schools are 57-58%! In another website, the rate is only 61%! That's how many students can read at or above grade level! Is that acceptable? (BTW, this is Brevard County's current plan to fix their abysmal numbers.) Is that what you want for your child? You want them to grow up functionally illiterate? If not, YOU must do something to remedy the schools' abject failures. Below are the steps you need to take to remedy your child's illiteracy. You can do this. The steps below are going to help you teach your children to read. I homeschooled our sons and these are the steps I did.

Early Phonics: What can parents do to repair the damage done to their precious progeny and protect their futures? You can help turn around your child's illiteracy via taking some proactive steps that are both entertaining and creative. I homeschooled our two sons from Kindergarten to graduating Senior year. By the time they were in sixth grade, our sons were reading at the college level and not only able to pronounce the words they were reading, but also had a big enough vocabulary to be able to understand what the words meant. They could actually paraphrase the paragraph they just read and get it correct. I started with creative educational opportunities early in their lives. When they were babies, I made the alphabet out of plastic canvas and stitched primary colored yarn into it and scattered them on the walls of their room. When they were babies, I would take those letters down and show them the letter, let them touch them, tell them its name (A, B, C, etc.) and tell them the primary sounds that letter can make: A says long A sound (Ay) and short A sound (Ah); B says Buh; etc. Then I'd put the letters back on the wall in a different order so that if they remembered a particular letter from that day's phonics lesson, they could search the walls for it, recognize it and remember the letter's sounds. I started this when our eldest was only a few months old (when he was awake longer than just to eat) and did this through our second child's probably second year before we moved to the house we bought. I also read books to them from that time. As I homeschooled them, the phonics continued with flash cards and workbooks teaching the compund sounds like the "th", "ch" sounds, etc.

Due to that early start, they have loved reading from that time. I would take them to the library and, from an early age, they would check out books without pictures and as they matured, they would check out books about architecture, ocean liners, Chernobyl and read those books! They weren't interested in what most considered "age appropriate" books: they wanted to learn. That's what parents should be doing from the start; taking the time to teach their babies the sounds the letters make, then teaching the digraphs and dipthongs (have your student look those words up), and the rest of the phonetic process.

Vocabulary: You MUST create a vocabulary list of twenty words every week for your student (and perhaps yourself) to look up a definition, memorize that definition and test their memories with a quiz. If you can pronounce a word, but you don't understand the meaning of the word, yes, you can read the word, but you have no clue what it is the sentence is saying. The meanings cannot be gleaned without that basic ability to understand what the word means. If your college or high school student read the above paragraph and can't tell you what the words mean they cannot paraphrase the paragraph, nor can they answer basic questions about what I wrote. Vocabulary growth is essential and eminently vital to their ability to read.

Learning Fun: I made learning fun for our sons by being creative. We used to get the yellow pages (remember those?) dropped at our door annually, whether or not we wanted it. I took the opportunity to use that unrequested book for spelling, grammar and creative learning. I told the boys to find ads, scribble out letters, words, or even whole sentences to make the ad say something totally different. The rule: Their "Scribble Outs" (our name for the process) must have proper spelling, good grammar, complete sentence with correct structure and (this is important) have to be clean (no bad words and no sexual content). These "Scribble Outs" were checked and corrected if there were errors. This made learning fun, challenging and allowed them the freedom to go where they wanted to go within their learning experience.

Another form of "Learning Fun" was that we had satellite television at the time and we would read through the menu of programs available and try to put together sentences (correctly constructed) with the items on the menu. For instance (these programs may no longer be available, but at the time they were) "The Scarecrow and Mrs. King" followed by "Beauty and the Beast". Put a colon between the two and you get a funny sentence: "The Scarecrow and Mrs. King: Beauty and the Beast". We would do that and do "channel switching"; jumping from one channel to another and whatever was being said on the first channel would be the start of the sentence, and the second channel would finish the sentence. A very memorable instance of this fun was during an election year in which we heard on the first channel, "This is an election year" then on the second channel "the virgin shall conceive". The full sentence, as you've figured out, "This is an election year, the virgin shall conceive." Is that a complete sentence? Yes. Is it a correct sentence? Yes. Is it educational? Yes: because they have to be able to recognize a correct sentence. If you want to add something to it, ask if they can paraphrase it.

If your student cannot read, there is no shame in starting them back at the younger books so buy them books to read out loud at home, with you beside them. (This assumes that you've started on the phonics lessons already.) Your student should be reading daily with you beside them. With phonics onboard they should be able to get comfortable with the rhythm and cadence of reading and they should be getting more comfortable with the process. Build up to more words and pages. ALWAYS praise them for doing a good job. Never call them stupid, or give negative feedback. They're trying. That's the main thing. Keep rewarding them for showing up, trying, putting in the effort. It's an embarrassing admission that you can't read when you're in high school or college. The fact that they admitted it at all is a big step. Work with them. Remember the vocabulary list, too.

Parents Reading: Another very important point: let them see YOU reading! Children who read have parents who read. If they see you reading it will be something that they will be more willing to work toward. Non-reading parents trying to get their child to read will be less successful because children learn what they live. You can't say, "Do as I say, not as I do" if you're trying to get your student to read. It's only by example that your child will pick up a book and read if you're doing the same. Make books important in your home. Don't keep them on a shelf in a room no one enters. Put them within arms' reach in your student's bedrooms, the living room, family room, bathroom. Let them be able to reach over and grab a story wherever they are. Encourage their interests via reading. Do they love horses, get them stories about horses. Your student love oceanography? There are many books about the ocean, fish, coral, etc. (Sorry. Gave that one away, but you still get to see if they can sound it out.)

This is what will teach your child/student to read. It may not be easy. It may not be something you want to announce to the world, like you might their wedding, but it's worth it; for their future and their children's futures. Remember: If Mom doesn't read, nor will her child. Do you want your grandchildren to be illiterate?

Remember, if your student cannot read, pronounce, sound out, or define the bolded words on this page your student needs to be working on their reading skills. Start now.

Remember the older stuff is on Page Deux or on the Storage pages.