Program Review: Children Learning Reading

Is the development and education of your child important to you? And have you been searching for a program that will help you teach your child to read, but spending hundreds of dollars on unproven programs just doesn't make any sense to you? I can understand your frustrations, as I've been through much of the same experiences myself...

Recently I came across a step-by-step program that helps parents to easily teach their children to read. The wonderful thing about this program is that as long as your child is able to speak, it will help you teach your child to read fluently. I had some doubts initially when I saw that the program claimed that even 2 and 3 year old children can be taught to read effectively; however, my doubts were quickly put to rest when I saw their video proofs of small children reading.

The authors of the program, Jim and Elena, had developed their Children Learning Reading program, and then used it to teach their own children to read before turning 3 years old. They showed various clips of their young 2 year 11 months old daughter reading, and I was quite surprised to see how capable their daughter was at reading by the time she was just a little over 3 years old. I did not expect to see small 3 year old children capable of reading children's books! Here's a video for you to see:

Who Is the Program Designed For?

The Children Learning Reading program is designed for parents with young children between the ages of 2 to 6 years old. It is designed to teach toddlers and small children to read effectively. One important thing to keep in mind is that this program is not designed for extremely young children, or children who have not learned to speak yet. However, if your child has learned to speak, then you can use this program to teach your child to read.

The central goal of the Children Learning Reading program is to help your child learn to decode printed text quickly and learn to read fluently through the critical process of developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is arguably one of the most important aspects of learning to read, and becoming a fluent reader. Children who lack phonemic awareness typically have reading difficulties, and end up being poor readers. Jim & Elena's Children Learning Reading program is an extremely simple, straight forward, and step-by-step program. Their program includes simple exercises and practices starting with the very first lessons that work to help your child develop phonemic awareness, and learn to read. Clinical studies, and even the National Reading Panel has stated that helping children develop phonemic awareness is one of the most effective ways to teach children to read.

How Does the Children Learning Reading Program Work?

The program is designed to be taught to your child in two stages, and each stage comes with it's own instruction book and step-by-step lessons. Stage 1 helps your child develop all the important foundational skills of learning to read and read fluently, while stage 2 lessons deal with slightly more advanced lessons helping to greatly advance your child's already impressive reading skills developed from stage 1 lessons.

There are 28 lesson in stage one that are smoothly laid out to teach your child starting with the building blocks of reading printed text. The alphabet letters and sounds are introduced to your child in a stepped, sensible, and intuitive order through the 28 lessons. Very simple words and blending exercises are introduced very early on, and more complicated words, sentences, stories, and rhymes are slowly introduced with the lessons as your child progress. By the time you complete stage one lessons with your child, your child will have already developed superb reading skills that sometimes leave you even surprised and amazed.

Once you complete stage one, you can move on to stage 2 lessons, which involve teaching some more complicated matters dealing with reading. There are 22 lessons in stage two. One of the main focus of this stage is teaching your child letter combinations or also known as digraphs. The words, sentences, lesson stories, and rhymes here are more advanced, and work to greatly increase your child's reading skills and reading fluency.

The one thing that really struck a chord with me about this program is that it doesn't force your child to explicitly memorize any phonics rules! Being parents, I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to have toddlers and young children memorize rules to reading! The wonderful thing about Jim & Elena's Children Learning Reading program is that throughout the entire program, your child learns to read, and develops phenomenal reading and decoding skills without memorizing any phonics rules. This is why their program is so effective at teaching children to read.

Another huge plus of this program is that the step-by-step lessons are designed to be quick and effective. Each lesson typically takes no longer than 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and some lessons take just 2 or 3 minutes to complete. As you can imagine, with the short attention span of small children, short lessons like these will be much more effective and productive than long, drawn-out lessons. To teach your child to read, all that you need to do is follow the lessons step-by-step, and spend 5 to 10 minutes each day consistently teaching your child to read. In just 12 short weeks, you will be extremely pleased that you have taken then time and effort to give your child the most important skill in life - reading.

The Children Learning Reading program gets my 100% recommendation.

>> Click here for the Children Learning Reading program, and start teaching your child to read today!

Teaching Children to Read and Write

Most parents, at one point or another, frets over the education and the development of their children. Many concerned parents research and seek information on the topic of teaching children to read and write. I for one, am glad to see so many parents wanting to get an early start for their children in reading and writing, because studies have shown that developing these abilities early on before entering school provides numerous benefits and advantages later on as the child progresses through school.

More worrisome should be the fact that over one third, 38% to be exact, of all grade 4 students cannot even achieve a basic level of reading ability according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is an alarming statistic. Will your child become one of the 38% who cannot reach basic reading achievement by grade 4? For most children, this poor ability to read can be easily prevented with early phonemic awareness teaching.

Reading must begin early in the life of a child, whether it is just an alphabet letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or a story. Teaching children how to read must begin early on, and children should be exposed to books, stories, rhymes, and be read to on a daily basis. Children as young as 2 years old can learn to read if you teach them to read with the proper instructions. Please watch the video below of a 2 year 11 months old reading randomly constructed sentences.

As Lida Williams said, almost 100 years ago:

Phonics is not a method of teaching reading, but it is a necessary part of every good, modern method. It is the key to word mastery, and word mastery is one of the first essentials in learning to read. A knowledge of the sounds of letters, and of the effect of the position of the letter upon its sound, is an essential means of mastering the mechanics of reading, and of enabling children to become independent readers.

100 years later, this still holds true. There has been a great debate on what method of teaching is best to teach children how to read: whether phonics or the whole language method is better. The whole language learning to read method is more of a "word memorization" plan, where a young child is supposed to memorize the "shape" of the word, and say it.

It is important to distinguish the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness is very broad, and includes phonemic awareness as a sub category. Phonemic awareness is very narrow, and it is only focused on the phonemes, which are the individual sounds of letters. There are no shortage of studies which have repeatedly found and concluded that teaching phonemic awareness to young children produces exceptional reading and spelling abilities. You can read more about research on phonemic awareness here.

The whole language method simply expects a child to "read" when presented reading material, and by memorizing sight words. The phonics method is a bottom up approach where you teach children to read in a logical and sequential order. You first teach children the alphabet letters and the sounds they represent; then you teach children to combine (or blend) various letter sounds together to form words; which is then followed by reading sentences and simple stories. This is a logical progression for children learning to read, where they develop accuracy in decoding words and pronouncing words. This method of teaching also helps the child to spell correctly.

There's no doubt that phonics and phonemic awareness instruction is the superior method to teach children how to read. We have successfully used phonemic awareness instructions to teach our children at age 2 to read words, sentences, paragraphs, and simple story books. If you would like to learn about our simple, step-by-step method to teach your children to read and write, please click below:

Teach your child to read today using our step-by-step, proven method for teaching young children to read

Advantages of Teaching Children Reading Early

Before a child learns to read, he or she must first learn the spoken language, and this is one of the first instances where family members such as dad, mom, older siblings, and grandparents play an important role in "teaching" the child the spoken English language. Whether young children realize it or not, they gain very early exposure to the alphabet when parents sing the alphabet song to them. They begin to develop language skills by being read to and spoken to. One of the keys to teaching children reading early on is by exposing them to alphabet letters, books, and reading to them often.

Reading nursery rhymes and children's books are an important part of getting children to understand printed text. Talk to your children, and talk to them often, whether they understand or not is not important when they're just babies. The more you talk and interact with your little ones, the better they will develop. The key is exposure, and repeated exposure. Once your child learns to speak, you can begin teaching them reading at home.

I often hear parents say that they don't want to "push" their child too hard. How can teaching your child to read at a young age be considered "pushing" them too hard? If you as a parent already have the mentality that reading is a chore, and teaching them to read is pushing "too hard", you certainly can't expect your children to be excited about learning reading. On the contrary, learning to read offers a young child an opportunity for a lifetime to learn, discover, and enjoy the wonders of reading. Parents (including myself) will often underestimate the abilities and learning capabilities of young children. When we first began our teaching reading program with our first child when she was 2 years and 8 months, little did we expect that in just a few short weeks, she would be reading not just words, but sentences and story books. After about 3 months, by the time she was 2 years 11 months old, our daughter could read "Step in to Reading - step 2 (pre-school to grade 1 level)" books with some guidance. The benefits of learning to read were apparent - improved speech clarity, and better reading ability and reading comprehension.

There are no shortage of studies which find many benefits in teaching children reading at an early age. For example, one study administered a Stanford achievement test at the start of kindergarten and then again at the end of grade one found that early language based skills were highly associated with later academic performance in school aged children. [1] Similar studies also found that a high level of letter knowledge in kindergarten can reliably predict better later literacy skills.[2] Having a home environment that's conducive to literacy growth is critical in a child's development, and directly affects a child's language and literacy development. Studies have found that responsiveness and support of the home environment is the strongest predictor of children's language and early literacy skills. [3] My point here is help make parents aware that children who enter kindergarten with highly developed early reading skills will achieve greater success with systematic reading education. [4]

It's never too late to start home lessons and programs to teach your children to read. Regardless how old your child is, starting a reading program at a young age will have ample benefits. Start with lots of talking, singing, and reading to your child right from birth, and once your child is able to speak, you can start a simple reading program.

Begin with teaching your child some basic letters and their sounds, and even as soon your child learn just a few letters and their sounds, you can begin teaching them simple blends using the letter knowledge that they have acquired. Work on ear training with your child on oral blending and word segmentation. One of the keys to teaching children read is developing phonemic awareness. Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of reading success in children.

>> Click here to learn about a simple, yet effective step-by-step teaching Children reading program

Notes:

1. Percept Mot Skills. 2001 Apr;92(2):381-90.
Relationship between language skills and academic achievement in first grade.
Kastner JW, May W, Hildman L.
Department of Pediatrics, Child Development Clinic, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson 39216, USA.

2. J Exp Child Psychol. 1996 Jun;62(1):30-59.
Kindergarten letter knowledge, phonological skills, and memory processes: relative effects on early literacy.
Näslund JC, Schneider W.
University of New Mexico, College of Education, Program in Educational

3. J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2005 Apr;48(2):345-59.
The role of home literacy practices in preschool children's language and emergent literacy skills.
Roberts J, Jurgens J, Burchinal M.
Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute,The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27599-8180, USA.

4. Psychol Rep. 1994 Apr;74(2):403-7.
Kindergarten predictors of first-grade reading achievement: a regular classroom sample.
McCormick CE, Stoner SB, Duncan S.
Psychology Department, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston 61920.