The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, Revised Edition Instructor Book

I started teaching my son (at age 4) to read with another program (Teaching Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons) and we both hated it. We are so much happier with this phonics-based system that takes a logical approach to teaching reading. He is now almost 7 and an excellent reader for his age and I am now using it to teach my 4-year-old daughter to read.My favorite thing about this program is that it teaches to read based on phonics rules, rather than just memorizing sight words. Once a child understands the rules and mechanics, they can figure out how to pronounce most words, although there are PLENTY of "disobedient" words that break the rules and must be memorized. As we go along, I am increasing my own understanding of the English language, which is an added bonus!There are 223 lessons, so you will use this over several years. My son is finishing 1st grade and we are only at lesson 149 (silent "d" before "ge"), but at this point, the lessons take 5 minutes or less. The bulk of our reading time is spent on practicing reading out loud, which is highly recommended for older children. The practice is critical and should be done starting with short periods of time and increasing as the child ages.There are recommendations in the back on how to prepare a younger child to learn to read before you even start a formal program. The first two sections of the book introduce each letter/sound, starting with the vowels using poem memorization. My 4yo daughter was NOT into the poems, so we spent a lot of time learning the names, characters, and sounds of all the letters with songs and alphabet books, then focusing on vowel sounds before we started using this and were able to jump in at Section 3 to start sounding out short-vowel words.Each lesson presents a sound or a rule, then a group of words to read through, then a few sentences containing some of those words. I have found that if you are starting with a 4-year-old, some of the lessons can be overwhelming, especially the reading application, so I just break it into parts. For instance, they may be learning 3 or 4 sets of consonant blends with corresponding words and paragraphs in one lesson. We do one or maybe two sets in a sitting and then stop and resume the next day.There are scripted instructions to make teaching easy, but if that's not your thing, it's easy to get the gist of it and put it in your own words. The instructor book is quite large/heavy, but I appreciate that it is a one and done program. You could use the instructor book to have your child read from, but you would have to sift around the instructor notes. It is advisable to get the student book for your child to read from.Overall, I highly recommend this program.

Simple and to the point to teach.

You'll need both the teacher's and student's books for this, but it's definitely worth it. The most you need for materials is some letter magnets and a bunch of index cards. We've found so much joy in teaching reading using this simple methodical method. You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy lesson plans to teach reading. If you can read, you can teach your child. All the lessons are scripted and incredibly easy to follow.

I like the way this is put together. My granddaughter asks for lessons every day and is enjoying the book. My grandson does it because his sister wants to, but gets distracted and wanders away. They are 4.

Easy to use for teaching

It’s not explanantory enough it’s confusing don’t like it

Overall this program is so simple and thorough and helped my 4.5-5.5 year old go from beginner reader to chapter books in less than a year!I used the first edition, and it was difficult at times to deal with the instructor text and student text mixed together. Though I loved it overall. Now that my second child is learning to read I appreciate having the seperate books for reading lessons!