If you have a young student in your home school, someone has probably recommend that you use Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It’s a staple in most home school communities. It’s incredibly inexpensive, it’s reusable, it’s one simple book instead of complicated curriculum, and it literally holds your hand as you walk through teaching your child to read, even if you do not have the faintest idea how to get started.
Besides all that, it works. I’ve successfully taught two out of three of my children to read using that little book. The middle child told me I could try but he wasn’t going to read because he could make up far better stories on his own than anything some else put on paper. He’s still that over-confident about all his endeavors, haha. But eventually, somehow, reading clicked for him. He spells atrociously since he refused to learn his phonics, but that’s another story and another headache for another time. 100 Easy Lessons teaches children how to sound out words. It works them through hearing all the sounds and getting the word. By the end of the book, they can sound out any word that is spelled phonetically ad they’ve learned a handful of sight words that can’t be.
What 100 Easy Lessons does NOT do is dig into all of the various weird parts of the English language–the various sounds g can make; the silent k, g, and w at the beginning of some words; that wind can be pronounced two different ways and have two different meanings; and so much more. When your student graduates from 100 Easy Lessons, he will have truly accomplished something BIG and should be celebrated, but his reading lessons are far from complete.
Continue reading “We Finished 100 Easy Lessons… Now What?”