Reading....for the love of learning

I've taught 3 children to read already. When I first started homeschooling it was a daunting task for me. Why I couldn't even remember how I learned to read. Did they teach me phonics or whole language? My first language is Spanish, but I had to learn English sometime around 8 yrs.. old. Most children in 3rd grade have already learned to read by then, so I'm not sure how they taught me since I was placed in a 3rd grade class as soon as school began the year we arrived to America.

Children are all different. My first son took off after the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons. We briefly went over the Hooked on Phonics stuff and moved right into spelling rules because he has been reading  and progressing on ever since. He reads at the speed of light and keeps me hopping as I try to keep up with the young adult section of the library.  My second son was a different story. He couldn't take all the sounds that TYCTR offered. We had to go straight to Hooked on Phonics and slowly learn the short sounds, then the long sounds, then the diagraphs, dipthongs...etc I still monitor his oral reading to check to see where his vocabulary is going and how much he is retaining when he reads. My third child was average, not to slow and not to fast. She was right where she was suppose to be and moving on at the expected pace. But the fourth, well let's just say she is a combination of the second and her very own.

So what have I learned about teaching children to read?
1. They need to be exposed to a lot of phonetic awareness activities, like listening to rhymes and then having them fill in the end of the well reviewed rhyme. Ex.
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great ____

This is the first step in their brain making a connection with sounds.

2. Reading is not a race that we should start as soon as we our child is 3 or 4. Some children are not ready at 4 or 5, but how long do we wait till we teach them to read? The question lies in the child and his abilities.  In homeschooling there is a great advantage to waiting but also to starting. YOU must spoon feed the child history, science, etc until he can proficiently read for himself. Why? Because if not they will be delayed in everything else. I say this because I am not a believer in letting children choose when it is time to learn to read. Reading takes a bit of work for some children. Their abilities may well be able to start reading but not their will to work at it. The advantage to delay is that the child may need a little more time to mature, to develop motor skills, to grow mentally. This is not an option in public school, where children get left behind because they didn't grasp something as quickly as others. So you must observe the child and his phonetic awareness, his ability to recognize letters, and whether he can retain information well or not.

3. Once we teach them to read, we must listen to them read orally for the next couple years. Listening to them read orally is important because you can catch reading problems this way. You can tell whether a child is having trouble pronouncing words and which sounds specifically he is having trouble with. You can tell whether they know how to divide syllables this way. You can tell if they are smart enough to retrieve the information from what they are able to read by context clues  and or because they substituted words they could not sound out. And you can help them by making them face the word. By having them read each syllable and reminding them why it makes that certain sound. They will learn when to pause, when to stress words, etc...

There's probably more that I could say but everyone is waiting for me so we can go to the library at this very moment.