Program Review: Children Learning Reading
Is
the development and education of your child important to you? And have
you been searching for a program that will help you teach your child to
read, but spending hundreds of dollars on unproven programs just doesn't
make any sense to you? I can understand your frustrations, as I've been
through much of the same experiences myself...
Recently
I came across a step-by-step program that helps parents to easily teach
their children to read. The wonderful thing about this program is that
as long as your child is able to speak, it will help you teach your
child to read fluently. I had some doubts initially when I saw that the
program claimed that even 2 and 3 year old children can be taught to
read effectively; however, my doubts were quickly put to rest when I saw
their video proofs of small children reading.
The
authors of the program, Jim and Elena, had developed their Children
Learning Reading program, and then used it to teach their own children
to read before turning 3 years old. They showed various clips of their
young 2 year 11 months old daughter reading, and I was quite surprised
to see how capable their daughter was at reading by the time she was
just a little over 3 years old. I did not expect to see small 3 year old
children capable of reading children's books! Here's a video for you to
see:
Who Is the Program Designed For?
The
Children Learning Reading program is designed for parents with young
children between the ages of 2 to 6 years old. It is designed to teach
toddlers and small children to read effectively. One important thing to
keep in mind is that this program is not designed for extremely young
children, or children who have not learned to speak yet. However, if
your child has learned to speak, then you can use this program to teach
your child to read.
The
central goal of the Children Learning Reading program is to help your
child learn to decode printed text quickly and learn to read fluently
through the critical process of developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic
awareness is arguably one of the most important aspects of learning to
read, and becoming a fluent reader. Children who lack phonemic awareness
typically have reading difficulties, and end up being poor readers. Jim
& Elena's Children Learning Reading program is an extremely simple,
straight forward, and step-by-step program. Their program includes
simple exercises and practices starting with the very first lessons that
work to help your child develop phonemic awareness, and learn to read.
Clinical studies, and even the National Reading Panel has stated that
helping children develop phonemic awareness is one of the most effective
ways to teach children to read.
How Does the Children Learning Reading Program Work?
The
program is designed to be taught to your child in two stages, and each
stage comes with it's own instruction book and step-by-step lessons.
Stage 1 helps your child develop all the important foundational skills
of learning to read and read fluently, while stage 2 lessons deal with
slightly more advanced lessons helping to greatly advance your child's
already impressive reading skills developed from stage 1 lessons.
There
are 28 lesson in stage one that are smoothly laid out to teach your
child starting with the building blocks of reading printed text. The
alphabet letters and sounds are introduced to your child in a stepped,
sensible, and intuitive order through the 28 lessons. Very simple words
and blending exercises are introduced very early on, and more
complicated words, sentences, stories, and rhymes are slowly introduced
with the lessons as your child progress. By the time you complete stage
one lessons with your child, your child will have already developed
superb reading skills that sometimes leave you even surprised and
amazed.
Once
you complete stage one, you can move on to stage 2 lessons, which
involve teaching some more complicated matters dealing with reading.
There are 22 lessons in stage two. One of the main focus of this stage
is teaching your child letter combinations or also known as digraphs.
The words, sentences, lesson stories, and rhymes here are more advanced,
and work to greatly increase your child's reading skills and reading
fluency.
The
one thing that really struck a chord with me about this program is that
it doesn't force your child to explicitly memorize any phonics rules!
Being parents, I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to
have toddlers and young children memorize rules to reading! The
wonderful thing about Jim & Elena's Children Learning Reading
program is that throughout the entire program, your child learns to
read, and develops phenomenal reading and decoding skills without
memorizing any phonics rules. This is why their program is so effective
at teaching children to read.
Another
huge plus of this program is that the step-by-step lessons are designed
to be quick and effective. Each lesson typically takes no longer than 5
to 10 minutes to complete, and some lessons take just 2 or 3 minutes to
complete. As you can imagine, with the short attention span of small
children, short lessons like these will be much more effective and
productive than long, drawn-out lessons. To teach your child to read,
all that you need to do is follow the lessons step-by-step, and spend 5
to 10 minutes each day consistently teaching your child to read. In just
12 short weeks, you will be extremely pleased that you have taken then
time and effort to give your child the most important skill in life -
reading.
The Children Learning Reading program gets my 100% recommendation.