Techniques for teaching a young beginning reader

I learned to read when I was in first grade, when I was six years old going on seven.  But so many of the beginning readers I teach today are much younger.  Right now I am working with a five-year-old kindergartener, one of the youngest boys in his class.  Although he is bright and ready to learn to read, he is also fidgety and inattentive.

Maybe you are working at home during the pandemic with such a kindergartener?  How do you teach such a child without both you and he becoming frustrated?

The answer is to have multiple ways of teaching the same concept, so when attention wanes, you can try different approaches.

Suppose you are teaching blends at the beginning of short-vowel one-syllable words.  For such a child, I would schedule either multiple ten-minute lessons, or a thirty-minute lesson divided into three parts.  What could those parts include?

• Review using lists for five minutes.  Reading lists of words is a good way to begin.  Reading lists is boring, so move on quickly.  If the words are printed in large type with lots of white space, that helps the words to look “friendly.”
• Using flash cards make great reviews too.  They also can become boring quickly.
• Making words of letter tiles covers a lot of words in a short amount of time.
• Reading words on BINGO-like cards of words turns learning into fun.  Nine words per card (three words across by three words down) is few enough not to overwhelm the child.  Ask the student to cover a word when you pronounce it.  Then ask the child to pronounce the word and you cover it.  Pennies or tiny candies used as markers offer incentive to play this game.
• Reading cartoons in workbooks can be fun.  The drawings attract the child, but sometimes they offer clues to words which the child does not sound out, so be careful.
• Working on appropriate workbook pages from a supplementary series is another approach.
• Having the child handwrite words reinforces them and improves printing skills.
• “Writing” words in a dish of sand or sugar can seem more like fun  than learning.  I would use this type lesson at the end of the time period because other approaches might seem boring in comparison.
• The same goes for online learning.  Often it is more attractive than “analog” methods.  But old-fashioned methods can target the child’s specific needs quicker.