I’ve written before about some of the things we used early on in helping Gareth learn to read, like the We Read Phonics series, the Mouse Makes Words book, and Evan-Moor’s Word Family series workbooks. Though Gareth enjoyed these things, he was still needing a lot of help and firmly at the “struggling emergent reader” stage, rather than the “confident fluent reader” he is now. Somewhere in the following series of materials, things “clicked” and Gareth became a reader:

All About Spelling “more words and phrases” section at the end of each lesson, has taken Gareth from slowly reading (sounding out) simple CVC words, like these, in April:

to this by late June, when we finished Level 1:

to fluently reading this, today:

All other materials we borrowed from the library. We used two ‘Sound of the Letter A / B / C etc’ phonics reader series, both from Child’s World. The Wonder Books Phonics Readers with titles like:

and the Phonics Friends series, with titles like:

We read much of a second series Treasure Bay, the folks who do the We Read Phonics books which Gareth loved. This series is called We Both Read, and has you and your child reading the story together, your parent page with more complex text, and the child’s page simpler. These books have a very good progression from pre-reading (child’s page has only one word, and it completes a rhyme from the parent’s page), to quite complex. We stopped at Level 1-2, with Gareth reading about one paragraph of material on his page. I thought the titles that were retellings of classic stories / fairy tales were particularly good, and the series has a good balance of fiction and non-fiction, boy-friendly and girl-friendly titles:

The I Can Read! series, specifically the “My First I Can Read!" titles, like the adventures of Biscuit the pup, Mittens the cat, and more:

Now, we are out of series books and on to a HUGE fantastic levelled reading list (which you can find here) which I learned about at the Well-Trained Mind K-8 Curriculum board. (If you haven’t checked the boards / forums out yet, I’d encourage you to do so, as discussion is not all about the Well-Trained Mind or even conventional curriculum. And folks there range from conservative Christian school-at-home to athiest / agnostic unschoolers, and everything in between.) Though my local library only has about 1/4 of the titles (I’m finding it has more of them as we get further along to higher levels), the list is so huge that even with that low ‘hit ratio’, my family room floor still looks like this:

Gareth reads me 2 or 3 books each day, sometimes more. We always read snuggled together on the couch, making it one of my favourite times each day. Hope this gave you some new ideas for creating a low-cost learning-to-read program for your own kids. Happy reading!

AAS is a very easy-to-use program, though it does require you to ‘teach’ it to your kids. (It’s not something they can do independently). But it is very teacher-friendly, each lesson broken up into small parts, and laid out clearly. I find it easy to either go with how the lessons are laid out, or adapt and expand off them—there is a structure to the program, but it is flexible. Kinda like a certain HSing family I know.

There are several parts to the AAS program. The core of it is in the teachers manual, which, for level 1, breaks the material into 24 lessons. I’ll show you our learning one of the last lessons in the book, on plural words, in more detail below. There are also different cards to use: Phoneme cards, which can be more complex than you might think, even for simple letters rather than consonant teams (sh, th, etc.) or other combos (oa, ar, ight and others that come in later lessons):

Sound cards, which are phoneme cards in reverse (you tell your child the sound or phoneme; they tell you which letter makes those sounds). Key cards, which illustrate rules of key concepts, like the “Floss Rule” below:

And word cards, which form the spelling lists that go with each lesson. I used them for reading practice for Gareth at the beginning of each lesson, about 10 per day, shuffling the cards and placing them face-down: Gareth flips and reads. I file in ‘mastered’ or ‘needs review’ (file tabs come with the program). And you can imagine a struggling reader’s confidence growing along with the pile of mastered words (note the huge stack in the background):

I also have the magnetic letter tiles (which come with the program) and a lined whiteboard, which I bought elsewhere. Now, let’s move on to look at the Plural Words lesson in some detail. I begin by consulting the teachers manual, and getting all the materials I need; a list is laid out for you. As I said, very teacher-friendly. Each lesson has three parts: the lesson itself (including review if you want; I simply use the word cards to give Gareth reading practice); a list of 10 spelling words, and a ‘more words and phrases’ part which again I use for reading practice rather than spelling.

I have the boys come up and participate in the lesson. My kids really like the tiles:

So now we have the first piece of information about plural words: the S at the end can make one of two sounds in English, ‘s’ or ‘z’. In fact, the ‘z’ sound at the end of an English word is far more likely to be spelled with an S than a Z! (AAS is full of little tips and rules like this, about things you intuitively know as an English-speaking adult, but are often hard to formulate in rule form for your kids learning to spell. “Just memorize it” doesn’t work for all kids).

We then looked at the other way words can be pluralized in English, with an ‘es’. We can tell when to use ‘es’ because we gain a syllable (AAS uses the concept of syllables a lot—open syllables, closed syllables, and 4 other types, and ties them to spelling rules. Ever wonder why ‘even’ and ‘seven’ don’t rhyme? Well, we’d divide the words into syllables as follows: e-ven, sev-en. The first syllable in ‘even’ is open, which means the vowel E is long. The first syllable in ‘seven’ is closed, so the vowel sound is short.):

I then summed up the lesson with a chart:

And you may have noticed Gareth’s extension of the lesson to a word he is quite keen on these days. The boys let me know the plural of pokemons followed the ‘add S, make ‘z’  sounds method, and we debated how to break the word into syllables, and what sort of syllables they were). The ‘lesson’ part here took maybe 10-15 minutes. AAS is very good at breaking material up into very small, very manageable parts.

Then it was on to the ten spelling words. I have the boys write these on paper in a notebook (so they can look back over time and see how their writing has improved), and Daegan uses the opportunity to practice cursive writing, as the words are quite easy for him. Side benefit: Gareth can now read cursive! Here’s their writing, Gareth first:

One thing that impresses me about AAS is how there are links back to earlier lessons. Within this spelling list, for example, we have connections to previous lessons where we learned when we use K and when we use CK for the ‘k’ sound. Do you know the rule?

We use CK immediately after a short vowel, and K otherwise. Hence ‘trucks’, but not ‘desks’—though the E is short, the ‘k’ sound does not follow it immediately.

We also had a link to the “Floss Rule" of a previous lesson. Why do we double the S in dress? Because in English we often double final Fs, Ls, and Ss in single-syllable words (hence, FLoSs rule).

And finally, some practice with the ‘sh’ phoneme we’d recently learned (all this was review and easy for Daegan—though he was surprised to learn that CH can also say ‘sh’, like in ‘chef’; but for Gareth learning these small bits, step by step, has been key to him ‘breaking the code’ and now reading fluently):

It takes us maybe 10 minutes to do the spelling words, and we like to make up silly sentences to go along with them, and make each other giggle. Honestly, I had no idea spelling could be such fun!

After the spelling words, Daegan does some independent work (right now he’s using Growing With Grammar, which I’ll write about another time), and Gareth comes with me to do some reading practice. Snuggled on the couch, we always start with the “more words and phrases” section at the end of each AAS lesson, and move on to a couple books. (I’ll write more about the rest Gareth’s ‘learning to read’ program another time too). I found the “more words and phrases” section of AAS a perfect fit for building reading skill and fluency; earlier lessons were simple words, and by the end of Level 1 he was reading full sentences. (There are also new readers matched to each lesson in the All About Reading program you can buy from the same folks):

I hope this gives you a good idea of what the AAS program is about, and why I like it so much. And while Level 1 is very basic, it has several more Levels, building slowly but comprehensibly and to a surprising complexity. We’re about half-way through Level 2 now. But the very best thing about this program, to me, is how my youngest son feels about it—and himself. Here he is the day he completed Level 1; a picture really is worth a thousand words, no?

I thought I’d start with some language arts apps that Gareth is enjoying. Gareth is now past the very beginning stages of reading and writing, but if your child is at that stage you can search the app store for terms like “learning to read” “phonics” “ABCs” and so on and you’ll find a ton of things, many of them free. But once you get past that very beginning—match the letters and sounds / here’s how you print the letters / let’s make simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, like ‘c-a-t’—the pickings slim down considerably. Two of the best I’ve found so far are:

Sight Words by Little Speller

and

Sight Words by Photo Touch

both from the same company, GrasshopperApps.com. The first is a spelling game; the second a reading game. Both games use the same 220 Dolch sight word list, broken up into 5 levels/grades: preschool / K / 1 / 2 / 3. Preschool (Level 1) words include ‘away’ and ‘said’; grade 1 (Level 3) includes ‘could’ and ‘know’ and grade 3 (Level 5) includes ‘eight’ and ‘laugh’. The words do not overlap between lists, meaning you’re getting a unique group of 40-50 words per level. Both games are highly customizable (just go to the settings button), right down to recording your own voice reading the word—something that came in handy as the Sight Words by Photo Touch reading game had an incorrect pronunciation (the voice said “ask” for the word “as”), so I simply recorded my own voice over it. It also means that depending where you live in the English-speaking world, you can customize pronunciations to reflect regional differences, something as a Canadian I appreciate with the grade 3 word ‘about’! The customization options are very detailed and well thought out; let’s looks at the Sight Words by Photo Touch game in more detail.

You play this game by selecting the word being said aloud from a group of cards showing various words on them (like a flashcard). As you progress and do well, the game gets harder by adding more cards to choose from for any given word. You can customize whether or not to give hints, the minimum and maximum number of cards to display, whether or not have error and success sounds, whether you are picking words from only one level/grade, or a few, or all.

The spelling game works similarly, with kids having to put jumbled letter tiles in order to spell the word given. For younger kids you can leave the hints on the screen (the word spelled underneath the jumbled tiles in the centre of the card, as well as shaded in lightly in the tiles area, so kids are matching letters more than spelling. Gareth plays the game with the hints off, so he only has jumbled letter tiles and a blank tiled word space below:

Simple game concepts, but very easy for kids to navigate, and parents to customize. Gareth has played both and likes them, as they are perfect for his literacy level right now.

Another game Gareth enjoys, and which feels more “like a fun game like Mom and Dad play” and less like edutainment, is:

Whirly Word.

This is your basic “make words out of this collection of letters’ game, like Scrabble or Boggle, and there are tons of variants of this game available in the app store, many (like Fishtropolis, Textropolis, and Chicktionary) with free versions.  But Whirly Word is Gareth’s favourite by a long shot, and for several good reasons. First, the letters are displayed in a circle, around a central ‘enter’ button, a layout I think helps new readers / spellers see more easily how various letters can go together to make words; there is no long chain where the first and final letter are far from one another. Second, the game limits itself to 6 letters. Third, it allows 3-letter words. Lastly, you go from one level to another in the game in one of two ways: either by making the longest (6-letter) word, or by making enough words for your progress bar to get past a certain line. This game is VERY generous in that progress bar, allowing my beginning 6-year-old to find enough words (often simple 3-letter CVC words) to make the ‘green light’ come on and allow him to choose to go to the next level. You don’t NEED to go to the next level, however, and for older kids (or adults) you could play to find more or all words before going on. But Gareth LOVES this game, and I can see why. He can play it without help, spell words, and go from one level to the next based on his efforts—just like Mom and Dad do on the far more complicated games like Fishtropolis, which starts at 4 letter words (not 3), and has far more letters (than 6) to combine.

Finally, I’ll mention a game I love, and is a good stretch for Daegan (age 9) or older kids:

Word Jewels

In this game, you have a honeycomb of letters and need to make words, moving from any letter to a connected one (does not have to be in a straight line). But there’s a twist: to go from one level to the next, you need to use all the letters that have a red background. The game starts deceptively easy: in Level 1 there is only 1 of 25 honeycombed letters that is red, and you are given just one turn to eliminate it by spelling a word that includes that letter. (Any letters you use to spell disappear, and the rest of the honeycomb letters slide down with new ones added at the top, like Bejewelled Blitz). In round 2, 2 red letters and 2 turns, and so on, but you soon max out on the number of turns you get to eliminate all the letters (9 turns is the max). I found it fairly challenging by the early teen rounds (eliminating, say 14 red letters in 9 turns), and the highest I have ever gotten is level 26 (yes, one past all 25 letters being red and needing to be used). You have one other helper in the game, and that is the ‘shake’ button, which reshuffles the letters on the screen, allowing you to proceed if you get stuck. (Take my advice—get rid of those Js early, or they have a way of getting stuck in corners!) You get points for the words you make, more points for longer words, as well as points for any unused moves (if you are able to clear the red letters in 3 moves instead of the 4 you were given, for example). ‘Shake’ carries with is a points penalty, but it does not count as a turn.

Have fun, and I’ll share some more apps later!

and a set of tangram pieces ($1). Gareth was quite keen to try it out and made several animals yesterday from the beginning part of the book, where the outline of each piece is given:

As you progress through the book, some of the individual shape outlines are removed, until by the end, only the outline of the entire animal is left. Gareth looks quite pleased with himself, no? It was hard to get him to stop so we could have lunch and get to our art playdate at a friends’ for papier mache!

And what was Daegan doing in the background? He’s taken a real interest in learning to handwrite (cursive), and was practicing some letters:

We’ve been using a program I am LOVING called All About Spelling, which I will write more about another time. The spelling lists we practice have Daegan working on spelling (below his level; I’m mainly using the program as a learning-to-read program for Gareth), as well as proper lower-case printing and cursive, like so:

Gareth, in contrast, spells the word any way he can (usually capital letters). This leads to our whiteboard looking like this for ten short words, as I write so the boys can self-check: (the list of words on the right-hand-side came from our discussion of the strategy of looking for smaller words inside larger ones—helpful for both spelling and reading)

I’m sure things will change in the future, but with the new homeschooling room the boys are super-keen to learn, learn, learn and ‘play school’ right now….so I’m running with it!

Level One begins with the alphabet and basic sounds, the difference between vowels and consonants, short vowel sounds and a few sight words. Gareth was able to do this level with little difficulty, though reading some of the longer sentences proved challenging—e.g., “Nan and Meg sat on the red rug.” He can sound out all these words, and knows the sight word “the”, but he needs practice getting his speed up and reading sentences rather than individual words. I like how the DVD divides up the content into short segments, and builds slowly, from sounds to words, to word families, to saying the word after the narrator, to saying it before the narrator, to reading entire sentences. The picture and video clues also vary, in the beginning being presented alongside the letter or word to cue the reader, and later being presented afterwards (i.e., after the reader has read it to themselves). I especially liked how they did this with sentences. There was one something like “Jan had a red wig and Nan had a red cap”, and only after Gareth figured out the sentence on his own (I paused the show to allow him enough time), and then the narrator said it aloud did a picture of two women, one with a red wig, one with a red cap, appear.  

Level Two features the elements of reading Gareth is working on right now. It begins with a review of the materials from Level One, and then goes on to talk about long vowels sounds and silent ‘e’, the difference between open and closed syllables and vowel sounds in English—e.g, the O in ‘not’ is short because it is “closed in” by the T, whereas in ‘no’ it is open and hence a long vowel sound (ditto for ‘go’ and ‘got’, ‘be’ and ‘beg’, etc.)—consonant blends, both beginning (bl, dr, str, etc.) and ending (nd, mp, ng, etc.), and r-controlled vowels (ar, er, ir, or, ur), as well as additional sight words. As in the first video, the skills build slowly, and sight words are presented in manageable groups of 6-8 words at a time. By the end of the video, kids can read sentences like “One time Jill rode her horse far from home and got lost.” If your child already knows their basic letter sounds, I’d say just get Level Two and skip Level One.

There are also U-print activity booklets on the discs, but we haven’t investigated them at all. Just watching the video in short segments together, me pausing the show and Gareth reading aloud to me has been plenty of practice. And just like with the Bob books, which we are also working through right now, Gareth almost always wants to do “just one more lesson / book” before we stop for the day, which is my sign that this program is working for him. YMMV. Please share any other beginning reader materials your kids have enjoyed in the comments. Thanks!

We’ve now read three level 1 books:

Pat, Cat and Rat and Matt and Sid are fiction; Big Cats non-fiction. All three were very comfortable for Gareth to read aloud. He’s also read my three level 2 books, which seem to be just the right level for him at present:

And two from level 3, which has proven a stretch for Gareth, but one he is managing with just a bit of help from Mom or Dad:

A few things I particularly like about these books. They start simple—very simple, much like the Bob books, just a few words per page making up a simple sentence: “I am Pat” or “I am mad at Dan!” The text is quite large and easy on the eyes of a beginning reader (why oh why do SO MANY beginning reader books have small type???), and the pictures colourful and engaging. The books keep to fairly simple words, but not in a stifling “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane” kind of way, as each book features some common ‘sight words’, like “there” “is” or “when”. I particularly like that a list of these sight words—again in large text—is included at the beginning of each title, allowing you to go over them with your child. And unlike other series which list EVERY word in the given book—my 6-year-old PANICS when he sees these lists, 3 or 4 columns long with 15-20 words per column—these titles focus on a very limited (8 – 10 or so) number of key or sight words, like so:

The beginning and end pages of the book contain suggestions for games and activities to support your developing reader, like playing sight word memory / concentration, or playing rhyming games, or incorporating movement into sounding out words for kinesthetic learners. And I love that they stress, right at the beginning, the importance of keeping reading an enjoyable activity, stating explicitly that if your child is becoming frustrated or bored, take a break! As a former elementary school teacher, I can tell you that I saw many parents win the battle, but lose the war when it came to reading. Yup, the kid CAN read, but he WON’T, unless forced to. Sigh.

Anyhow, if you are looking for a series of books to start with for very beginning (emergent) readers other than the ever-popular Bob books, give this series a try.  Watching Gareth’s confidence grow as he reads one book per night—even seeking out other members of the family to read to now—has been heart-warming.

Gareth is now reading at a grade 1.45 level (i.e., at a level of a typical child half-way through grade 1), whereas last year he registered as a grade 0.75. Gareth was able to read 29 words this year, focussed on simple phonetic words, words with silent e, words with double O (e.g., zoo) and words with double E (e.g. see). All other vowel and consonant blends stump him, so I’ll be doing more with him on decoding letter combinations in the next year (e.g., TH, AY, OU, etc.). Daegan never needed any explicit instruction in learning to read, so I’m treading new ground here—suggestions welcome! The 29 words Gareth was able to read this year were:

see, swim, sat, made, lake, frog, duck, green, dog, and, zoo, tree, dad, bed, run, pet, doctor, brush, slope, cake, soon, week, spend, tent, dusk, best, camp, dress, egg

It should be noted that, as I did last year, I wrote Gareth’s words out for him on index cards, as the typeface on the assessment itself is quite small. I am interested in his reading abilities, not his eyesight at this point.

Daegan is now reading at a grade 9.2 level, whereas last year he was at a grade 7.35. He read the words from grade P (i.e., Kindergarten) through grade 4 perfectly, and made 2, 1, 3 and 3 (out of 20 words each) mistakes in pronunciation on the lists for grades 5 through 8 respectively. It was at grade 9 that there was a big drop-off, as he was able to read these 11 (of 20) words:

ornate, priority, aquatic, aggressive, industrialist, nutritional, indispensable, malicious, premature, chastisement, legacy

and he mispronounced or missed entirely these 9:

regime, suffice, judicial, legitimate, arduous, masquerade, decipher, scrupulous, memorandum

It should be noted that while Daegan’s reading is at a grade 9 level, the rest of his literacy skills—such as spelling, writing, and sentence structure—are not. As I said, he picked up reading effortlessly; I take zero credit other than providing him with ready access to all kinds of books. His brain is just wired that way. Next year may be the last one for this assessment for Daegan, as there is only one more level past grade 9, that of high school (of which he could read 2 of 20 words). If anyone knows of other easy-to-use reading assessments, please leave me a comment as it is helpful to have a baseline each year to mark progress. 

Gareth saw that he could make the word SUB, so he flipped up the B. He also could have flipped the B by making BUS, or flipped the G and H by making GUSH, or the F L and H by making FLUSH, etc. The object of the game is to be the first to flip up all your letters, but as Gareth is still early in the ‘learning to spell / learning to read’ game, I was just happy to see him create legitimate words, and kept my own word creations at a similar level to his.

The game is quick and can be played at many different levels. When all four of us played a match, Daegan had three letters remaining and rolled, as follows:

He could only see HIT, but there was a word that would have allowed him to use all his letters and win the game. Can your child figure it out?

The other sign of Gareth’s increased confidence in reading came last night at the dinner table, as we were eating a rather bland stir-fry. “Is that hot sauce?” Gareth asked, pointing at a bottle on the table, a question which surprised us as, like many 6-year-olds, he is quite happy with bland food. But he had a follow-up question: “Does that say ‘red hot’?”

As far as I know, that is the first time Gareth has definitely read words in his environment. He’s ‘read’ other things before, like “Burger King” or “Diego”, but I would think they are him recognizing logos rather than true reading.

I’ll be giving the boys their annual reading level assessment tomorrow; I am curious what sort of improvement we’ll see over last year, for Gareth in particular.

The boys have also had a few firsts recently. Yesterday, Daegan blew his first reasonable-sized bubblegum bubble (i.e., not a teeny pea-sized pocket with a bit of air in), and was right proud of himself:

And I found this drawing in Gareth’s room. As far as I know, this is his first understandable-to-others printed sentence (I have oodles of pages of loops and scratches ‘pretend writing’, as well as sentences made of random combinations of letters). This is a new stage of Gareth’s literacy skill development:

The sentence, for those not fluent in Gareth, is “My dinosaur is powerful T rex.”

Oh, and the sun shone pretty much all day, the temps climbed above freezing, and I heard my first chickadee “fee bee / spring’s here” call. February days don’t get much better than this!

Anyways, one of the activities I did today with Gareth was Word Ladder. Word Ladder is basically a sight word / reading activity that most kids find a lot more fun than plain flashcards. I drew and coloured a fairly elaborate ladder (I had the time as the boys were merrily drawing dino pictures), but a 30-second sketch of a series of rungs is sufficient.

I then chose 15 words from Kaye’s “Words for Beginning Readers: Easy” appendix (you can pull word lists from a variety of sources; google “Dolch word list” for a good starting place), and wrote them on index cards.  Gareth chose an frog to ‘hop’ up the rungs—use whatever you like for a token: a penny, an eraser, a toy car. etc. I flipped the index cards over one at a time, and if Gareth could read the word without help he got to hop his frog up the ladder one rung. I made a few more index cards than there were rungs on the ladder, as the goal is to get to the top of the ladder before you get to the end of the pile of index card words. Gareth succeeded both times we played, though the first time was close—he had to get the last 4 words in the pile with no mistakes, and he did!

This basic activity can obviously be adapted: as your reader gets stronger, you can flip the word for a short interval (say 1 or 2 seconds) to encourage sight reading rather than slow sounding-it-out; you could pick more complicated words, or have the frog hop down the ladder with a mistake. It can be adapted for other subjects: Daegan wants me to make a multiplication ladder to help him practice his times tables. Have fun with this idea, and if you come up with a particularly fun or unusual way to adapt this, please share.