Teach Your Child to Read in Just 5 Minutes a Day!

What comes to mind when you hear the words, ‘Teach Your Child to Read”? Does your face scrunch up while thoughts of temper tantrums and frustrating lessons memorizing the alphabet swirl in your head? It doesn’t have to be like that. You can teach your child to read in just 5 minutes a day! (Don’t miss the giveaway at the bottom of this post)

Your children’s reading ability is directly related to performance in all other subjects! So start today with just 5 minutes of instruction and build their skills and confidence. Here are some tips to help you teach young children phonics skills. Keep in mind that it takes practice. Learning to read doesn’t happen overnight! Be consistent, and you will see a big payoff.

4 Tips on Teaching Your Child to Read

Letter sounds are the most important:

When they are first starting out, the letter names aren’t as important as the letter sounds. If your children are very young, chances are they don’t have the skills to spell yet. That means you can teach the letter sounds first, and then when they start spelling (kindergarten) you can go over the letter names. Simply explain that just like a cow is called a cow, but makes the sound, “moo,” letters have names and make sounds.

If you have already started to teach the names of the letters, that is great! They can learn the letter names and sounds simultaneously just like they do with animal sounds. The monkey says “ooh ooh ahh ahh,” the letter A says, “a-a-a, like apple.”

Start with capital letters:

Lowercase words have their own unique shape, and children taught using lowercase letters will be able to memorize a word’s silhouette. So instead of sounding out the letter sounds, the words become memorized sight words. If you use all capital letters in the beginning, each word’s silhouette is a rectangle. This forces children to really sound the words out. Then you can move to lowercase easily later on after they have mastered sounding out words.

No Pictures:

Most phonics books include pictures. This is a terrible way to teach children to read. How hard is it to figure out what a word says when there is a picture right next to it? Pictures serve as cheats, and when the pictures are removed, children will have to learn to read all over again. Plus, children’s imaginations paint the most amazing pictures!

5-Minute Lessons:

This is so important because reading is usually a child’s first experience with formal learning. It is hard for young children to sit for long periods and focus. If parents aren’t careful, they can burn their kids out, not just on reading, but on learning in general. 5-minutes is enough to teach a new concept, but not so much that a young 3-, 4-, or five-year-old will get bored. If your children can handle more, you can do more than one lesson at a time, or you may even choose to do a few lessons throughout the day.

Blue Manor’s 5-Minutes Phonics book features all of these key elements and more! It focuses on letters sounds with capital letters (no picture distractions) and breaks them up in short easy to teach 5-minute lessons! PLUS, you can get the corresponding early readers with fun illustrations and silly stories so your children can practice after they complete a level. This is a great confidence booster!

Reading Reinforcement Activities

You can use the Blue Manor 5-Minute Phonics curriculum as-is; review and do a lesson or two from it each day for 5 to 15 minutes or however long your children like. Then, use activities to reinforce letter sounds or combinations. There are lots of activities on our blog, but here are 10 to get you started:

10 Activities to Help Teach Your Child to Read!

Find lots more reading activities by joining our Free eBook club! You’ll get learning activities and homeschool support, PLUS a free eBook for kids each month.

Struggling Readers

Some children struggle with blending the letter sounds at first. It may take them a while to learn this concept. Don’t worry! Your children are NOT behind and don’t need special help. Just help them a little more with the blending, and focus MORE on having them learn the individual letter sounds. Some children just aren’t ready or motivated to learn to read until an older age. Every child is different. You may need to take a break or just do the learning activities your children enjoy.

Teach Your Child to Read

If you want to teach your child to read, our Learn to Read book set is the perfect guide! There is no other program as simple to teach and learn! The teaching manual is broken down into 120 five-minute lessons which are separated further into simple steps. You can teach right out of the book! This paperback set also includes two volumes of early readers for a total of 12 stories.

5-Minute Phonics is broken into three levels. After going through Blue Manor Level 1 Phonics, your children will have learned how to read their first 100 words! Level 2 focuses on transitioning from capital to lowercase letters and also reading sentences. If your readers know how to read simple words but struggle with sentences and sight words (words that can’t be sounded out), Level 2 will help them improve their skills tremendously. Then the next step, Level 3, teaches rhyming, vowels, and difficult sound combinations. After completing the lessons and readers, your children will be reading at a second-grade level. You can also opt for the more affordable eBook version. The digital version also includes basic penmanship and grammar and has interactive audio in most of the books.

Start today! Teaching your children to read will not only give them confidence in reading, it will help them with critical thinking and increase their self-esteem.

Back to Homeschool Curriculum Giveaway!

You could win the Blue Manor Learn to Read Book set ($35.99 Value) plus more in this year’s Back to Homeschool Curriculum Giveaway on the Blue Manor Academy site. To enter, click here or click on the graphic below.

And be sure to enter the giveaway here on the Hip Homeschool Moms site too! Just scroll all the way to the bottom of the post and use the Gleam widget to enter.

Back to Homeschool Curriculum Giveaway!

Blue Manor Academy

An Idaho Mom of 4, lover of Jesus, and slayer of the dreaded laundry monster. She believes an elite education begins in the home and wants to help parents raise sons and daughters whose legacies honor their families and glorify God.