My kids started off with repeatedly reading books with sing-song rhythms - ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’, ‘Bathwater’s Hot’ - and after a while they would repeat every second line. My grandchildren have all started off that way. Along the way, we looked at letter and word shapes, tracing them with their fingers and matching them with some old flash cards I found in the loft. We used phonics a bit, and had fun recognising letters and sounds on shop signs, newspaper headlines and food labels as well as in books. Somewhere along the way, they discovered they could actually read, and from then, there was no stopping them.
I wasn’t ‘teaching children to read’, I was just incorporating text into their lives. One they could read, we had an old set of Griffin Pirate Stories readers which they enjoyed, which over the series develop a literary style - the later books are actually quite beautiful to read. Alas, they are no longer in print, but you can sometimes pick them up in charity shops or online. We had loads of fiction and non-fiction children’s books, not just cute picture books and reading books, but also dozens of old Ladybird books, including fairy stories, history, Bible stories and ‘how to..’ books, all bought in boxes for pennies at jumble sales. They grew out of picture books very quickly as their imagination and reading developed, and moved on to Enid Blyton novels, Roald Dahl and similar. They all loved the ‘Fudge’ books by Judy Blume. (In fact, one son asked me a couple of weeks ago if I’d kept the Fudge books because he wanted to read them to his kids.)
Long after they could read for themselves, I always read them a chapter of a book as a bedtime story - we did the whole set of CS Lewis Narnia novels that way, and loads of children’s classics, including ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and ‘The Sword in the Stone’, E. Nesbitt’s books and ‘The Railway Children’. They all sat around with their hot chocolate at bedtime, with the youngest on my knee and the others grouped around, until the youngest was way too big to sit on anyone’s knee. It petered out when the youngest got to about 14 or 15.
The kids were also used to seeing me read for pleasure, for recipes for their favourite food, for instructions to assemble furniture and when I received letters from their Dad and grandparents. You can’t put ‘reading’ in a box as a skill to learn and then move on - it’s part of the day-to-day fabric of normal life, like talking or eating. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with methods for teaching children to read - the underlying assumptions about written language and about children are all wrong.
