Reading in 100 Easy Lessons

Then

One summer when my oldest was 4 I mentioned to my sister that my child wanted me to sit down and start teaching her about reading. We laughed. But then she said, "You really should go through The Book." 

"The Book?" I looked at her quizzically.

"Oh come on! You have to remember The Book." She insisted.

I stared at her blankly.

She walked over to her bookshelf, pulled off a battered paperback, and tossed it in my lap.

"There. The Book," she said, with little fanfare, and perhaps a twinge of annoyance. "Just make sure you cover the pictures as you read through the stories."

I looked at it and a flood of memories came back. The Book.

Published in 1983, based on a book from 1969, a couple generations of our family have learned to read using the DISTAR method. 

Now

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons has been a great book for our family as we navigate reading. My sister's copy was beaten to bits and she loaned it to me for a summer. I fell in love with it and ended up buying my own. I had a very good experience with this book for my children, too.

It has everything you need right there in the book. All the words you say, all the things the kids need to read. Everything. And by the time they were done, they were comfortable reading chapter books.

Here's a photo of our older girl reading Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

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But we like to spice things up a bit as we read, and feeling what we're learning. Here are our tips for making this resource even more fun.

Spell and Sign

To make reading more physical, We gave each symbol (letter sound) a fun way of being pronounced, and used ASL to sign them alongside, too.

Here's a sketch of all of the letters in the alphabet. 

Do you want to print this coloring sheet? You can get your own full resolution copy at this link:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asl-sign-language-coloring-at-coloring-pages-for-kids-boys-dotcom.svg#mw-jump-to-license

If you want to learn the alphabet in ASL with a song, here's a link our favorite version of The Alphabet Chant, from Super Simple Songs. https://youtu.be/aEYcmNhz7Uc

Here's a photo of what to expect.

Infuse Personality

 It made things so personal, seeing each symbol was like running into an old friend. When they misread something I would point at the letter and say it in our fun voice, everyone would laugh and start sounding things out more carefully.

Here's a quick video of our kids practicing spelling some words in ASL, we have fun with it. https://youtu.be/u7O8zp3e5ng

so many giggles!!

Friendly Figures

She is far more focused when a figurine friend helps her to read. In this picture I am moving an Anna along each dot as we get through each word. The little figurine jumps and cheers for her as she gets through each reading.

Make Cards

That was really, really fun. But then we also made our own cards with the symbols.

It's nice too have something to hold. We copied the symbols from the book and wrote out flash cards to play with physically. We made each letter in either blue or red so we can see the differences between consonants (blue) and vowels (red). We put the cards together to build words of our own. We also used our cards as a reference, to look for the letter combinations and sounds as we read other books from our bookshelves. 

These little activities can add a lot of fun to the work of reading. We hope these strategies will be helpful for you, too!

Organize Books

We spent a couple hours on a Saturday goofily going through the books and sorting them by topic. 

We used a finicky mechanical label maker to make little labels for the shelves. We thought of simple names for each category. We labeled our recipe books "FOOD". Here's a photo of the label our 10 year old printed.

In the process, we touched pretty much every book in our home. They were scattered around us in piles, which we worked through as we put them back on our empty shelves.

This exercise showed them just how many books they still have to read! They were so excited about it. Here's a photo of our oldest reading The Magic Grinder in the library.

Snippets of conversations overheard:

"Spine out!"

 "Push them forward so they have a gap behind them for airflow"

 "Is this fantasy or science fiction?"

 "Another book about bunnies?!"

"Please can I stop to read?"

Enjoying the books, sharing them with each other, not just tossing them in a pile...

Now that's a fun way to get them motivated about #reading.

Products

Do you want to purchase these books on Amazon? If you purchase them through our links, you will support our education efforts.

Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons: https://amzn.to/4azflis

The Ramona Collection: https://amzn.to/3WQ58Lg

The Magic Grinder: https://amzn.to/4aAmm2k