Background
We began reading to Anouk when she was 3 months old (no other reason than the fact that we happened to purchase the first board books only by then) and the first 3 books still remain among her favorites 20 months and 200+ books later. We used to read to her when she was simply lying on the bed, and after a while, during meal times, when she's perched on her high chair, before naps, and at different times a day, each spanning over 5-10 min, and even 20 min on rare occasions, back then and a common thing, now at 22 months. Around the time she was 14 months old, we started researching on how to teach her to read. After a really inspiring and thought-provoking essay[1] from Larry Sanger and quite innumerable articles on early reading together with some friends that promote early reading with their kids, we were convinced of the relevance of teaching the phonics sounds in addition to the name of the alphabets. Our approach is based on a collective knowledge from all of them - rather than sticking to any particular norm, and we did bend the methods to suit the child and household and not something completely innovative.
Setting the ground work - learning the alphabets and sounds
Now, some would argue that introducing the name of the alphabet itself is unnecessary and that only the alphabet sound matters in the beginning. But, we felt that it'd be extra effort for the parents as we'll have to revisit the sounds and teach her the names once she has mastered the sounds. So we set out on the following plan.
Now, some would argue that introducing the name of the alphabet itself is unnecessary and that only the alphabet sound matters in the beginning. But, we felt that it'd be extra effort for the parents as we'll have to revisit the sounds and teach her the names once she has mastered the sounds. So we set out on the following plan.
1. Parents learnt all the phonic sounds based on [2]. Trust us when we say that we did not learn the phonics in our respective school system. :)
2. DIY flash cards - this requires a bit of elaboration and so I have captured it as a separate post altogether[3]. Essentially, these flash cards helped to teach her all the 26 alphabets, both upper and lower cases, as well as the phonics sounds. The most interesting part of the flash cards was the flexibility it allowed when to use, be it meal time, in between general reading, a quick 1-2 minute revision later in the day etc.
3. Videos - At this time, we also started active search for good videos, which teach the alphabet sounds and names, in an interesting way. After a VAST search, involving parents vetoing out each other on different videos, we narrowed on readingbear[4], (again from Larry Sanger) which we found extremely helpful. The methodology, the step-by-step approach to introduce kids to the world of reading and the videos themselves were quite impressive, given the fact that our child loved them, and having rejected some videos before.
4. Last, but not the least, we had made an alphabet and numerals wall [6] for her, when she turned one. This, though was more of a DIY project accomplishment for the parents at the time and not very appreciated by the kid at that time, she started to use it very frequently around the time, she started learning the alphabets, together with a range of library-borrowed alphabet books
The below list captures the videos we used at different stages of her learning, from different sources, mainly from readingbear.org. A learning progress checklist[5] that we found here, was quite helpful in understanding where our child stood in terms of learning and in figuring out the nature of the videos we should be searching for the next step.
1. Listening to, practising and singing alphabet song (in that order, ideally :) )
ChuChu TV ABC - Slightly more advanced and more loved.
2. Learning, practising and singing the letter sounds (though a few in the first list will also help)
Jolly Phonics - was an interesting pick, thanks to 26 different songs in familiar rhyme tunes.
3. Saying the letter sound (and name) when pointed to.
This is one step where we spend most of the time, as we wanted to make it quite sure that the child is absolutely fluent and comfortable with the letter names and more importantly, the letter sounds, as we felt there should be no setbacks on this account, when we start learning the blending.
We were always very keen not to teach the alphabets/sounds in any particular order, even after learning to sing the ABC song. No particular reason, other than seeing some kids struggle to identify the letters and trying to remember from the sequence, which we felt was not the right way for learning alphabets, though good for numerals. At all times, we continuously kept reading to her. Reading together is one of the important, frequent and the baby-loved-and-led activities that keeps happening at home all the time owing partially to both parents' love for reading. And we believe, this has been the most important aid and most singular motivation for her to learn the alphabets/sounds.
Moving on... Blending the sounds and read words
We started showing her the videos and flash cards when she was around 18 months, and after 5 weeks, she appeared to have learnt all the phonic sounds together with the upper and lower case letters. The learning sessions were strictly informal and never lasted more than 10-15 minutes everyday, including a 5-6 minute video time during dinner, the only time of the day when these videos were shown. Most importantly, the learning activities were(and are, still) pure fun for the three of us. Anouk grew quite excited when she realized that she could actually read the letters and sounds aloud from her books' title, parents' badminton racquet covers, her shampoo bottle, to cite a few real-life examples and it was more like, it hit her (in her head :D ) that she could find a correlation between her learning exercise and the practical applications.
At 21 months, we started introducing the blending techniques. Again, readingbear.org is proving to be highly successful with its no-nonsense, non-flashy, aesthetic and interesting (for children and adults) way of learning. This is where we are right now, and it mostly involves, the parents pointing and sounding out the letters, with the kid jumping eagerly to form the word, correctly or otherwise :D And the learning goes on...And we still enjoy reading together everyday.
References
[1] http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Why-I-Taught-My-Toddler-to-Read.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Phonics
[3] http://blog.arunbhanu.com/2017/01/diy-2-phonics-flash-cards.html
[4] http://www.readingbear.org/
[5] http://www.readingbear.org/lettersounds/RBLetterSoundProgressSheet.pdf
[6] http://blog.arunbhanu.com/2017/03/diy-3-alphabets-and-numerals-wall.html
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