The Reading Lesson with CD-ROM

We all want our children to read. With great pride we watch our children learn the alphabet and sing the ABC song. We buy picture books and read to them every night. When she can recognize a particular word or he can write his name, we are thrilled. But this is still far from reading the way we understand it. We try to teach reading, but often do not know where to start. So easy for us, reading seems so difficult and confusing to teach.

We found ourselves in this situation when our daughter was four years old. She learned the alphabet, and we were waiting for her to start reading some simple words. We sent for several commercial reading programs, the same ones you often hear advertised on the radio. What we got back was a slew of cassette tapes and flash cards. Our daughter would not sit and listen to the tapes, and the flash cards were all over the house. We also bought software programs for learning to read and found them too shallow and haphazard. Disappointed, we began to make our own simple exercises and stories for her to read. We read books on reading instruction for children, researched academic material, talked to parents and teachers, and began to develop a simple daily reading program. Michael's understanding of child psychology and development, and my desire for a simple, easy-to-follow method, led to the program you hold in your hands.

We have created the Reading Lesson for parents who want to teach their children to read and for instructors teaching basic reading skills to children. The program is suitable for both home schooling and classroom use. It is structured, clear and simple but it does require direct involvement of the parent or a teacher, which we believe is a key element in learning to read.

The Reading Lesson is designed for any child who shows interest in books and reading. Some unique features of this course also make it useful for older children with reading difficulties. What makes this program special The Reading Lesson offers an easy-to-follow recipe for teaching children to read. It takes a child with no reading skills to about the second grade level in reading. Never-too-hard and never-too-easy, step-by-step the lessons teach phonics and build the sight vocabulary. We begin the lessons with three to four sounds and introduce sight words as we go along. Word recognition skills develop through the use of key words. Once these key words are learned using Phonics, we encourage the child to read them as sight words to gain fluency. Certain words such as you and do are difficult to explain using the phonic principles. These and other non-phonic key words are presented as sight words. The Reading Lesson uses a controlled vocabulary of developmentally appropriate words. The vocabulary of the program closely corresponds to the 500 most commonly used words in English. We use many of these words as key words. The Reading Lesson does not follow the alphabet. Instead, we begin by teaching the most common letters in the English language. That way, the child can begin reading words and simple stories from the very first lesson. There are no boring drills. All reading is context oriented. You will hear your child say, "Look, I can read!" after the very first lesson. Happiness is knowing that you are making it possible. The Reading Lesson uses only lower-case letters in the first ten lessons of the course. Often young children do not know the lower-case letters well. Realizing that ninety-five percent of all letters in print are lower-case letters, this is where we start. Upper-case letters are introduced later in the program. For children who know the capital letters of the alphabet, the transition from the lower-case to the upper-case letters is easy. The Reading Lesson uses special typography. The letters are large in the early lessons and get smaller as we progress. The words are spaced far apart, and page clutter is kept to a minimum. We use special symbols to help the child learn the complex and irregular rules of English pronunciation. Children often confuse certain letters, such as b and d. There are special marks to help the child distinguish these two letters. The Reading Lesson is designed for children ages 4 to 8. Since most children in this age group cannot follow if-then rules, or rules such as i before e except after c, we have kept all rules to a bare minimum. Your child will learn these rules in due course as part of the school curriculum. We do not even teach the difference between vowels and consonants. As you will see, your child can learn to read just as well without knowing any of these rules.

Charan Langton and Michael Levin are a married couple. Michael is a physician specializing is learning and behavioral disorders of children. Charan is an Engineer.