Why The Reading Lesson?

 

​ The Reading Lesson offers an easy-to-follow recipe for teaching children to read. It takes a child with no reading skills to about second grade level in reading.  Never-too-hard and never-too-easy, step-by-step the lessons teach phonics and build the sight vocabulary.

 

 We begin the lessons with three to four sounds and introduce sight words as we go along. Word recognition skills develop through the use of key words. Once these key words are learned using Phonics, we encourage the child to read them as sight words to gain fluency. Certain words such as you and do are difficult to explain using the phonic principles. These and other non-phonic key words are presented as sight words.

 

 The Reading Lesson uses a controlled vocabulary of developmentally appropriate words. The vocabulary of the program closely corresponds to the 500 most commonly used words in English.

 

 The Reading Lesson begins by teaching the most common letters in the English language. That way, the child can begin reading words and simple stories from the very first lesson. There are no boring drills. All reading is context oriented. You will hear your child say, "Look, I can read!" after the very first lesson.

 

 Often young children do not know the lower-case letters well. Realizing that ninety-five percent of all letters in print are lower-case letters, we use only lower-case letters at first. Upper-case letters are introduced later in the program. For children who know the capital letters of the alphabet, the transition from the lower-case to the upper-case letters is easy.

 

  The Reading Lesson uses special typography. The letters are large in the early lessons and get smaller as we progress. The words are spaced far apart, and page clutter is kept to a minimum. We use special symbols to help the child learn the complex and irregular rules of English pronunciation. Children often confuse certain letters, such as b and d. There are special marks to help the child distinguish these two letters.

 

​ The Reading Lesson is designed for children ages 4 to 8. Since most children in this age group cannot follow if-then rules, or rules such as i before e except after c, we have kept all rules to a bare minimum. Your child will learn these rules in due course as part of the school curriculum. We do not even teach the difference between vowels and consonants. As you will see, your child can learn to read just as well without knowing any of these rules.

 

 The Reading Lesson concentrates primarily on teaching the child to decode, that is, to read. Decoding should not be confused with reading comprehension. Our goal is to give the children basic reading skills so they can begin to read independently.

 The Reading Lesson is a multimedia program to allow children to grasp the material both from the CDs and the video with sounds and images, and through books that are an essential part of this program.

 

​The Reading Lesson is designed for any young child who shows interest in books. Many unique features of this course also make it useful for older children with reading difficulties.

 

​The program is organized along lessons. We have organized the book in 20 lessons. Each lessons will take about 1-2 weeks to complete.  It  takes a child from no reading skills to about the second grade level of reading in 20 lessons. And all it takes is approximately ten minutes a day.

 

​Handwriting letters is a very important part of learning to read. We would like you to encourage getting the handwriting program that goes with The Reading Lesson.