Every child is different so your experience may end up being entirely different, but so far now we’ve noticed an awesome trend that because of a special type of book our kids are only taking a year or so to become confident readers (albeit sometimes too confident!).
The books I’m referring to are called High Frequency Word Books by Reading A-Z. And if it’s not awesome enough that they exist, with a free account they actually give you just enough credits to download and print every one of the books for yourself (or at least they did when we found them). If that’s no longer the case, they would still be worth a pretty penny…or at least a normal penny!
These books take the perfect approach to scaffolding the reading process. “Scaffolding” is just a fancy academic way of saying progressing step-by-step so that new things build on old things, like most math classes. But anyway, they scaffold the reading process so well by starting kids out with the most frequent words first, those being the only words they read. Now, you might think, “the a is the the is” doesn’t sound like it would be a very interesting story, not to mention the difficulty of making it grammatical, but that’s where these books really shine. They keep the stories flowing by inserting less frequent words along with a picture of the word in the text.
Here’s an example from the first book:
Here’s another example from the last book:
And at the beginning of each book they go over all of the new words, the reused words, and the extra “story” words.
So what do you think? Interested? Go ahead and give it a try and see what you think! We have fully incorporated these into our school agenda and really think they could help everyone. For more on the method we would suggest for guiding your children in learning to read, see our entry on Guiding to Read.
And for those of you who print in black and white like we do, take note that for at least one of the books the story mentions colors explicitly, so you’ll want to take some time coloring. But whose ever going to balk at a little coloring, right?