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 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.
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We begin each 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 such non-phonic words are presented as sight
words.
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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. This list is often called Dolch words. |
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The Reading Lesson begins by teaching the most common letters in the English
language. This 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. Simple sentences are read along with stories.
You will hear your child say, "Look, I can read!"
after the very first lesson.
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Young children often do not know lower-case. 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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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. |
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Although all you need to teach a child to read is our book, we recognize that all children like multimedia, movement, sound and animation. The Reading
Lesson program includes animated CDs that allow children to grasp the material
with sounds and images. |
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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. It has been used by many schools and parents for children with develomental delays. |
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The
program is organized along lessons. It
takes a child from no reading skills to about the second grade level of
reading in 20 lessons. Each lesson takes about one to two weeks to complete. And all it takes is approximately ten minutes a
day. We suggest only about 3-4 pages a day depending on the child's age. |
