Homeschool Kindergarten Reading Block
You’re planning your homeschool kindergarten reading block. You’ve may have just begun to teach your child to read, you have a struggling eight-year old reader for whom reading never clicked the first time around OR, maybe this is your third child, and you’re considering using a different approach when teaching your son or daughter to read. Wondering which 3 homeschool kindergarten reading mistakes to avoid when teaching your child to read this time around homeschool mom? Get the Homeschool Kindergarten Reading Checklist!
Mistake # 1
Not using an organized, phonics-based approach in your homeschool kindergarten reading block. You may be piecing a few simple readers with random alphabet worksheets as part of your child’s beginning reading instruction. Mom friend, I applaud you for at least starting the process of familiarizing your child with the alphabetic principle, which is single consonants and vowels in the alphabet where there is a 1:1 correspondence between a sound and a letter, or symbol and getting your child interested in simple picture books. Did you know that phonics has made a huge comeback in classrooms across the country, and has replaced the whole Language cueing system and for good reason. No pun intended here, but phonics rules! What is phonics? Phonics is applying relationships between sounds and symbols your child learns in the English Language to read words. Some of these sound-symbol relationships are simple 1:1 sound-symbol relationships based on the alphabetic principle. A spells a, G spells g, t spells t, s spells s, etc. A phonics-based approach will really help your child to read when he begins to read words with digraphs, long vowel teams and multisyllabic words. Homeschool mom, when you understand, and are familiar with the 44 sounds in the English Language, you can teach your child simple phonics strategies that work on ‘rinse and repeat’ for all 44 phonemes or sounds. This really simplifies your phonics instruction when you can use the same phonics activities each lesson, while having your child learn and apply another of the 44 phonemes in the English Language to read and spell words. When you can teach your child sound-symbol relationships for the 44 sounds in the English Language, your child should be able to decode these symbols they see in words, automatically link these symbols or graphemes to sounds and accurately decode or read text on a page. This is the goal of your homeschool kindergarten reading block. You want your child to be able to read text.
Mistake #2
You’re not using decodable texts inside your homeschool kindergarten reading block. You’re expecting simple leveled books to be enough to teach your child to read. Another way I could phrase this is to have your child memorize simple, patterned texts with words in a predictable, repetitive order. You might say, “But my child can read these simple readers.” Yes, your child may be able to read predictable patterned texts, with some words memorized by sight.” However, once you get past the very early emergent reader stage, your child is likely to struggle reading longer words, words with digraphs, r-controlled vowels and multisyllabic words when she can no longer simply memorize more and more words by sight in order to try and read more complex texts.
Mistake #3
A third mistake you might be making in your homeschool kindergarten reading block, is not including a couple of sight words, or heart words as called by some curricula in every single lesson. You may have come across sight word lists, such as Dolch and Fry Sight Word Lists. A phonics-based approach to teaching your child to read will include some irregular words. Some curriculums call these sight words or heart words, because they do not follow phonetic spelling rules. An example of this is the sight word ‘heart’. Your child can sound out the /h/ at the beginning and the /t/ at the end, but what about the middle? She will see the letters ‘ear’. In advanced phonics lessons in late Grade 1 and Grade 2, she will learn that ‘ear’ spells /ear/ in near and tear, and in another phonics lesson, you;ll teach her that ‘ear’ can also spell /air/ in the word ‘bear’ and ‘pear’. What is unexpected in this sight word, is that when your child breaks apart the sounds in the word /heart/ when spoken orally, will repeat /h/, /ar/, /t/. The word ‘hear’ is irregular in spelling because the r-controlled vowel spells /ar/, not ‘ear’. You can see that a phonics-based approach of teaching your kiddo, including a couple of these sight words in each lesson, will help her read, not by applying her knowledge of phonics to any word, even longer words with trickier word endings.
