Heather McAvan - Learn to Read the Easy Way

HEATHER MCAVAN, founder of Mrs Mactivity

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Copyright 2020 Heather McAvan

First published in 2020 by

Page Street Publishing Co.

27 Congress Street, Suite 105

Salem, MA 01970

www.pagestreetpublishing.com

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eISBN 978-1-64567-033-9

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951533

Cover and book design by Rosie Stewart for Page Street Publishing Co.

Photography by Hayley Price @ Polly Love Studio.

For Euan, Lewis and Rose.

When you have a child, helping them learn to read is probably number one on your list of priorities during the early days of their education. We all know how important reading is for enjoyment and life skills, but it also impacts a childs confidence and the whole way they view educationwhether its at home or school. Reading is everythingand if its an area you struggle with, it can have huge ramifications in every area of your life. But reading is also a joy. By reading, children and adults can escape to far-off places, have adventures, find out about people and places they never knew existed and open their minds to the past and future. Which is why its so important to get it right the first time. The problem is that for some children, reading can be a chore, not something they enjoy or see the value of.

As a parent, if your child doesnt like reading, it can be both scary and frustrating, and not always something that you have much power to change once that mind-set has been created. We all know that if something isnt working, its pretty senseless to keep going along the same path, which is why our approach to helping with reading is fresh, exciting and gives you as a parent the chance to spend quality time with your child not only in an educational way, but by sharing enjoyment and being creative, too. This book isnt about worksheets; our approach is tactile, hands on and activeusing everyday materials that you either have at home or can buy extremely cheaply in your local dollar store. These activities also help promote other key skills, such as looking, listening, turn-taking, joining in, making choices, waiting and learning new vocabulary. As a qualified teacher and mother of three primary schoolaged children myself, all of the activities have been kid tested and passed with flying colors!

This book is aimed at the four-through-six age range, although some of the earlier activities can be used with younger children from age two and a half onward. Later activities in the bookfor example, in the chaptercan be used with older children, too. In fact, many of the activities in this book can be adapted for more experienced readers by just substituting more complex words that are suitable for your childs stage. You can use this book in lots of different ways. You can start at the beginning and work your way through in a sequential way to build up reading skills as you go and supplement what your child is learning at school, or you can pick and choose activities from any section, according to where your child has need. Its also worth going from chapter to chapter, trying a selection of word making, word games, sentence building and sight-reading activities to build up your childs reading skills, too. Some of the activities in the chapters are designed to be followed in the order written, and in other chapters, the activities can be done in any orderguidance is provided for this in the introduction to each chapter. Naturally, this book can also be used by educators who are keen to adopt a more play-based, hands-on creative approach to teaching reading skills. All are welcome.

So, what are we waiting for? Lets get making and start learning!

Before we begin, its important to briefly introduce some of the terms and words used in this book that may be unfamiliar to you at this stage. Theres nothing too complicated, and children usually enjoy using the more formal language to describe what they are learning.

Phonics is a way of learning to read through decoding certain symbols that also have sounds. Call it code breaking, if you will. Once you know the code, you can put those sounds together to makeand readwords.

Phonemes are the sounds that lettersor groups of lettersmake. Sometimes, phonemes are made up of just one letter; sometimes, of groups of letters together.

Graphemes are the written symbols that represent the sounds, or the phonemes. This can be a single letter or a group of letters. There are often multiple graphemes for each phonemefor example, the phoneme ay as in play can be written as ai, a, a-e, ei and ey, depending on the word you are writing.

Digraphs are graphemes with two lettersfor example, ea or oo.

Split digraphs are digraphs that are split by a consonantfor example, in l-a-k-e, the ae sound is split by the k to give a long a sound. This is also called the magic e as the e at the end changes the sound of the other vowel in the word.

Trigraphs are graphemes with three lettersfor example, igh.

Blending is when we put phonemes together to make a new wordfor example, c-a-t.

Vowels are the letters a, e, i, o and u and sometimes y (at the end of words).

Consonants are any letters that are not vowels.

Consonant blends are when we put two consonants together and blend them to make one soundfor example, br.

Segmenting is when we break down a word to be able to write it according to the sounds we hear in that word.

Decodable/decoding refers to the process whereby we can read a word by sounding out each phoneme or letter sound. Some words cannot be decodedfor example, said.

Letter names are the traditional alphabet names that we give to lettersfor example, we call the letter