Teaching My Homeschooler To Read

My daughter is getting excited to learn to read. She has been working on learning her letters and we are gearing up to start Kindergarten with her soon. When we decided to homeschool my son I had a few hesitations, my main one being teaching him to read. I wasn’t sure I would know what to do or how to do it. Four years later he is reading far more advanced books than I would have expected for a kid his age.

I wanted to share how we knew when my son was ready to learn to read and what BookShark did to help teach my kiddo how to read.

I am a BookShark Brand Ambassador and did receive curriculum in exchange for sharing details of their product.

I Knew He Was Ready To Read

We got the Kindergarten curriculum for my son when he could recognize his letters. He could easily say his alphabet and could look at most letters and tell me which one it was. He didn’t have them 100%, but he was mighty close.

Tools BookShark Sends You

With BookShark Kindergarten we used “Explode the Code” A,B, and C books. These books are incredible. They are fun, easy, and he was able to do the pages quickly. He always finished the day’s lesson wanting to do more, so I didn’t have to convince him to do the work. The first week we started with letter “F”. In the Code books he would  trace letter “F”, find the letter in a line of other letters. He would circle pictures of things that start with letter “F”. Explode the Code A, B, and C books are optional for the Kindergarten curriculum, but I feel like it was a very important part of his journey to learning to read.

The Language Arts lessons that come in the Instructor Guide was a wonderful opportunity to practice writing the letter of the week. Each day had a simple task for him that was also fun. I love the Instructor Guide. It not only has the lessons planned for you with the pages to read in each specific book, but also helps you to know what you are teaching. There are prompts to follow if you are unsure exactly what to say to best teach the concept or letter you are looking at. I really believe the Instructor guide makes BookShark such an easy to use curriculum for those of us that have never been teachers.

We also used Handwriting without Tears book at this stage, as well as most recently using it to learn cursive. The first pages were fun to write and my son was loving the drawing aspect.

We looked at My First Picture Dictionary and really dove into letter “F”. We always enjoyed this book and would try and come up with things that we had in our life that would fit into the dictionary with that letter.

The idea of teaching my son to read initially was terrifying, but as we worked through each letter and spent the time really working on the sounds of each one it became an easy adventure.

There is nothing wrong with being ready to ride a bike while doing school work.

Learning to Read With BookShark

We began reading the Fun Tales series of books after he learned only 8 letters. It was an exciting time for us.

When we began reading it was slow. Which I have to guess is exactly how it should be. We did not sit down and read the book cover to cover the first time. We would read a page and take a break. Yes, that is only a few words. But our thinking was that we wanted him to love the process and not to ever get overwhelmed at any time.

The books are small enough for little hands to manage, short enough for them to be excited to finish it and entertaining enough to want to reach for the next one. I loved that while the books had photos they didn’t distract my son. He would take a couple of seconds on each page and look at the photo, but the photo didn’t compete for his attention for long.

Our first reading of each book was slow, but after he read it one time he would go back and read at a much quicker pace. It was a beautiful moment when my son would finish a book and have the look of pride on his face.

Teaching my son to read was something that initially scared me, but now that I know BookShark holds my hand through the journey I will be able to get my daughter started with much more confidence.

Learn more about why I love our BookShark Science Curriculum.