(We had a rare snow day here last week!)

Just an update here to celebrate that the seven-year-old finished all the lessons in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I’m really proud of him, and I can sense that he’s become more confident and has a different feeling toward learning how to read. Though sitting down to do his lessons is not his favorite thing to do, I think he’s excited to gradually be able to comprehend the written word.

Not much but a little…I have noticed him reading on his own without being asked to.  Once he sat down with me at my computer as I was writing my column, and he read a sentence that I had written!

So where do we go from here?

Well, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons has a list of books that they recommend starting with, and they offer a word list to go over with the child before they attempt read it. The first few books, I have discovered, are so easy that I’m skipping some of them, but I’ve ordered some of the others from the interlibrary loan system.

While we wait for those, I’m also using something else:

I inherited a Hooked On Phonics set from my aunt who is a retired elementary teacher. She had passed it on to her sister when she retired in case she wanted to use it with her grandchildren, and she never did, so that aunt asked me if I wanted it. Though I’ve heard some criticism of Hooked On Phonics, I never pass on something that is free, so I took it. It’s a huge set, and as soon as I laid my eyes on it, I thought it was too intimidating, and I probably wouldn’t use it. But my son walked into my room as I was looking through it. There are workbooks, tapes, etc. that I will probably never use. (But never say never!)  Then there are these single-page, folded workbooks with just a small piece of fiction or non-fiction on them and some comprehension questions. There must be a thousand of them, and they go from 1st grade level up to college level reading!

Though I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, I told my son I was probably going to give the set away. My son wanted to see it. (Maybe the fact that I said I was going to give it away made it more inviting?!) He wanted to see those single-page workbooks, and I said casually, “You wanna try to read these?” He tried reading the first one, and he read it just fine. He said after we finished 100 Lessons, he wouldn’t mind working on these. Who woulda thought?

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going read these little passages (that get bigger as the level gets higher). Before he reads them, I have been typing up a list of words that I think may be hard for him, and we go over them.  Armed with those words, he’s been able to read the passages very well, and they make a short and sweet lesson.

At some point he may get bored with these, but I’m hoping by then, he’ll be well on his way into reading books of his own choice.

(I know my aunt is probably reading this, so THANK YOU FOR THE HOOKED ON PHONICS SET!)