She Reads!

I never had to teach our first two children to read as they were in a school for those years. I did however teach my third to read and to be honest it was simple and exhilarating. Next up was teaching Squirt to read. Little did I know how much she was going to knock the wind out of my sails with how easy it is to teach a child to read.

Anyways, a year and a half later, after trying several methods, a friend of ours who is a teacher gave me some recommendations on how to work with her. We did a couple months of flash cards and her forming her own sentences with those same cards. Because summer was looming and I wanted something a little more portable than flash cards, I cracked open the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons again. Wow!! You would think that Squirt had never had problems with this book earlier in the year. We covered the first thirty lessons in a week. Now we're moving along at a comfortable two lessons a day, and she is doing extremely well.

Squirt puts the strong in strong willed, but when she decides to do something she will work at it until she finally gets it. Finally, she gets reading. She doesn't love it yet and would still rather be read to, but she can recognize hundreds of words now and can sound out even more.

So a little advice to you moms out there who are despairing that their child will never learn to read. (You know they will). Some just have their own schedule. Be patient, change it up, put it away for awhile (I did this too), whatever you need for your sanity, and the positive self-esteem of your child because sooner or later it will click and they will read!