I have a 2yr old boy that is showing all the signs of being ready to read. He is recognizing letters, knows his letter sounds, and can even read a few common sight words.. cat, dog... however, I was wondering if anyone has any books or programs that have been successful in teaching a very young child (still a short attention span) to read?
Thank you!
The book on the below website is a very good curriculum to use when a child shows readiness and is fairly easy.
http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/06...
As a teacher I feel the best thing to do would be to read, read, read to him. Read the same book over and over so he begins to catch on to the repition. Let him pick out books at the library and when you read to him, read with tons of inflection and use different voices for the characters! Also, play fun letter games such as "find something that starts with the letter A". I would play these games for short amounts of time each day so that reading and learning do not become a chore. Encourage him to "write" his own stories and then read them back to you. Also, have him dictate his stories to you, you write them and have him "read" them back to you. Make this as fun as possible so that he does not see reading as something he has to do, but rather something he LOVES to do.
Try the Leapfrog videos: The Letter Factory, The Word Factory, Code Word Caper (teaches silent e), and the Storybook Factory. They are great and the kids love them!
Use the books that you are already reading at home. Now I don't encourage computer time for toddlers but there is a great website called Starfall.com that has beginning reading activities. It has letter recognition games, phonics activities as well as more advanced things. I am a teacher and use this site for my lowest of readers(I teach middle school). Good luck.
As a librarian I would highly suggest that you go to your public library and ask the children's librarian to help you pick out some early reader books. The text is very simple, many have the rebus that you are talking about, and there are different levels.
And of course READ READ READ. Practice Dialogic Reading as well. Google it to learn more. Really it's reading "with" your child instead of "to". Pause for them to ask questions about what they are reading, ask open ended questions so that they can ask you questions back. It helps to build their vocabulary as well as to help them better understand what it is that they are reading.
I don't have any books for this, but I can give from experience. My younger daughter also, at 2 showed "readiness". She was a very verbal infant. At daycare she was always excitedly pointing to letters on the walls and saying their sounds.
I never meant to "teach" her to read at 2. But she learned it anyway. All I did is what loving parents do with all our children, and this one just loved reading so much she did it.
She absolutely loved those books that have little pictures as part of the story line (rebus, I think they are called?) So the sentence might be "The horse ate the apple" and she'd "read" the pictures for the horse and the apple. For reading words, she recognized "at" by the sounds, and got thrilled to start seeing "cat", "bat", "fat", etc in the books. I would read with her snuggled on my lap at bedtime and I read with my finger moving along so she could see where I was at so she could read the picture-"words".
Back then, there weren't many books available with mostly short vowel sounds, now there are lots of them. Montessori also has booklets that "grow" their words and sounds. But after she started reading words like "at" "cat", "bat"... I am honestly not sure how she taught herself everything else. I would NOT sit there and try to formally teach a toddler more. I was just going along with her "fun" with the at,cat, bat, sat.... but all of a sudden she was reading books... and it turned out that she was a natural speed-reader like her grandfather...
And such an early reader has a dark side. The world is full of very scary things for a toddler/preschooler to read. We had to be very careful about the newspaper and other books... even her older sister's books... even books the older kids read for school can have themes that are plain disturbing to a 3 or 4 year old.
And I reiterate... I did the same thing as others with any toddler. Just follow your child's lead. Don't TRY to teach it. If all your child does is have fun with some letters then drops the interest, that's fine.
Our actual focus (urging her) was on her PHYSICAL development, because THAT was the area most needed at that age, and where she lagged...
