What carrots taught me about teaching reading
If you've been here a while, you might know that I'm very new to vegetable growing. I'd say I'm a little more enthusiastic than I am successful. This weekend's job was planting out the carrots — a few months late, I know, but worth a shot!
To give you some context… I entered my carrots into the "Wonky Veg" competition last year… and won… wasn't quite the victory I was hoping for at my first ever village fete.
Anyway. The instructions on the seed packet just weren't clear enough for me. They were vague, they used gardening jargon… and I was clueless. So I turned to YouTube and found the most fabulous step-by-step video. It broke down the art of sowing carrots into simple steps.
“Sometimes we expect too much from our early readers. “Sound it out” is the most common thing we hear — but what if they can’t? What if they don’t know how?”
Most children at this stage just need the instructions to be more bitesize. And they need to learn by doing.
So here's what to try the next time your child reads a word like red and gets stuck:
STEP BY STEP
Grab a whiteboard or a piece of paper.
Write the word out nice and big.
Add sound buttons — a dot under each single-letter sound, and a line under any sound made from two or three letters (like sh or igh).
Give them a toy or a pointer — and let them choose it — then have them move across the word, holding each sound as they go. r… e… d…
Then blend it all together and read the whole word. red!
Here's a video of me demonstrating…
Are you at this stage with your child and need a bit more help? Inside my online course for parents, I share the exact steps to take to teach your child to read their first words.
If you want to give your child a strong start before school — and have them walking into reception on day one feeling confident — take a look at Little Reading Stars. It's been my most popular product this June, and it's open to families anywhere in the world.
And if your child can blend sounds but just can't remember what the sounds are, they might find The Phonics App helpful — it has all the sounds of English, and how to say them (with an English accent!).