On Teaching Reading

Because of the shift work of my job, I get to spend a lot of time as a stay at home dad. One of my goals has been to see how young I can teach my son to read. To achieve this, I have done a bit of researching on how to teach children to read, and it's interesting how difficult it is to find good information that has been vetted by experts without pernicious influence.  If you just try to search "teach my child to read" you will have to wade through scores of companies trying to sell you something.

I did find the Department of Educations evidence based report, called the National Reading Panel which was request by Congress in 1997 to guide how one should go about teaching a child how to read (full report is 448 pages, which can be found here or there is am more reasonable  summary here). There are probably other state and local level resources as well (and perhaps teacher union or groups) which I am not aware of.  It's actually pretty sad how hard it is to find an entity that's acting (presumably) in the interest education rather than a commercial enterprise to make money.  There were a lot of broken links on the government's websites.  I haven't read the entire report, so although I am aware of the general overview, I'm not sure if there are a lot of details in how to teach reading in the most effective manner.

Personally, I just try to read to my son multiple times a day.  Learning the alphabet was actually pretty easy (at one point we stopped because he couldn't say the three syllable letter "w", although he knew all the capitol letters, and most of the lower case ones).  Next came teaching him the basic sounds of each letter, which wasn't that much harder (we haven't tried "sh", "th", etc... yet).  Now I am at the point where I am trying to have him sound out words, but it is hard because he "memorizes" (often incorrectly), his books and just wants to say what he thinks the picture says rather than what the words actually say.  I will post some of my own methods of teaching him in case it might help others.