Learning to read tools
20 of the Best Tools You'll Want for Your Early Reader
by Tessa
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Finding the right early reader tools is key to teaching kids how to read. Maybe a good dose of patience too 🙂
Teaching my kids to read has been one of the most tricky things but also the most beautiful things in our homeschool.
This post will lay out the top 20 tools for early readers–some of these we’ve used in our own homeschool and some come highly recommended from my homeschool friends.
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Read on for the best early reader tools!
Our Top 20 Early Reader Tools
This is a big list of really helpful resources, but I wouldn’t ever recommend using them all at one time. Kids all learn differently. Sometimes they’re really eager to learn how to read. Sometimes they’re not at all interested. And sometimes they’re somewhere in between.
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When their interest starts to ebb, pull back a little bit. Sometimes time is the best teaching tool. There are times when we need to help push our kids forward and spur them on, but there are many times when we’re pushing for our own interests and we need to pull back. Reading is one of those times where we can definitely push way too hard. Find what works and stick with it and sprinkle in newer resources where needed.
Let’s check out the tools:
Early Reader Tools To Try:
- Hooked on Phonics Early Readers Kit // This how I taught my kids to read. It’s a complete curriculum that is perfect for all types of learners.
- Teach Your Child to Read // This is a full curriculum that just contains this one book.
If you’re looking for lots of hands-on manipulatives, this is not it. But it’s very straight-forward and easy for mom to use. - Explode the Code Phonics Book // We’ve used these tons from about K-3rd grade until phonics skills are solidified.
- Sight Words Flash Cards // These are my favorite flashcards for my kids. They’re super sturdy and come with a sturdy box too.
- Reproducible Sight Word Mini-Books // A fun “extra” to add in for your hands-on kiddo.
- Frog and Toad Collection Boxed Set // Classic first readers. Vera’s favorite!
- Beginning Reader Bob Books // I have used these with all my kids. They’re so simple but super effective.
- Bob Books Early Reader Kit // If you want to kick the Bob Books up a notch–great stuff included!
- Beginning Reader Workbook // If you have a workbook lover, this is a great option!
- Zingo Reading Game // This is so fun! Wish I would have had it for all my kids!
- Sequence: Letters Board Game // If your kids love games, this is perfect!!
- Magnetic Alphabet Set // Great for early readers and letter recognition.
- ABC Practice Board // Perfect for learning lettering.
- Pop Rhyming Game // Another really great little game for practicing reading.
- Daily Phonics Workbook // If your child loves workbooks, this is a good choice. Monday through Friday format and short lessons.
- Super Genius Card Game // This is like Spot-It for learning to read. This was one game that didn’t make Vera cry. Ha!!
- Reading Blocks // Another great hands-on addition for your kinesthetic child.
- Phonics Pathways Curriculum // This curriculum comes HIGHLY recommended from lots of friends.
- Epic Digital Reading // This is like a streaming app for books. A good deal and TONS of book options!
- Hooked on Phonics Subscription // We have used this during certain times we needed to change things up or if we were traveling and LOVE IT!
Have so much fun teaching your little person to read! It has been one of my biggest joys of homeschooling!
You also might like:
- Curriculum choices for 1st grade
- Curriculum choices for 2nd grade
- HOMER: Our New Favorite Reading App
- How to Add Music Appreciation to your Homeschool in Simple Ways
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Filed Under: Homeschool Tagged With: early readers, elementary curriculum, Homeschool, kindergarten, phonics app
Reader Interactions
A dozen easy tools to teach your child to read | by Manisha Snoyer (www.
modulo.app)The question families ask me most is how to teach their children how to read. Over the past 20 years, I’ve helped hundreds of families support their children’s learning through a huge variety of tools. Most recently, I did a comprehensive review of over 1000 secular curriculum resources for parents and tested many of them with our students at Modulo.
There were two main takeaways from this process. 1) Every child learns differently. 2) Any parent is perfectly capable of teaching their child to read with little effort.
The first thing I want to emphasize is that it’s not a great idea to force your child to read if they are not ready. In the USA, we often push children to learn to read before they’re ready. This can lead to a lifelong loathing of reading. In other countries, like Finland, it’s common for children to learn to read at age 7 or later. Some developmental psychologists think that it’s not even appropriate for some children to learn to read until they are 10.
Lastly, it is estimate that one in five children suffer from dyslexia. So, please don’t push before you understand your little learner.
This obviously part of a larger discussion, but for the time being, if you are looking for extra support teaching your child to read, here are my 10 favorite resources!
- Reading by Osmosis. A good number of children can learn to read on their own without help, simply by observing the text on the page as you read aloud to them. A slight danger here is they never develop phonemic awareness, but it’s an easy and wonderful way to read. I write more about how to cultivate this approach to reading here.
- Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Other children need more support with phonics. This book is the golden standard when it comes to direct instruction. It’s great for parents who don’t want their kids to have any screen time and have about 5–10 minutes a day to devote to their child’s instruction.
- Wild Reading. This is a lovely, nature-based curriculum for families who want to take their reading lessons outdoors, designed by a mother and teacher.
- Homer. If Teach your Child to Read is too dry for your child or you don’t have 5 minutes a day to teach them, Learn with Homer is a ridiculously fun app to teach literacy. They’ve also recently expanded to math, social-emotional learning and more.
- Nessy. One out of five children suffer from Dyslexia. If your child is dyslexic or you think they might be, Nessy is a great choice. If you’re unsure if your child has dyslexia, Nessy offers a screening tool for $20.
- Explode the Code. We also love Explode the Code. Both Nessy and Explode the Code use the Orton-Gillingham approach, which is widely considered the best method for teaching children with dyslexia how to read.
- Bob Books. Once your child can sound out 3 letter words, I highly recommend you move on to Bob Books. They have such fun and colorful books to teach reading. Bob Books also offers pre-reading skills. It can be super fun for you and your child to take turns reading aloud.
- Epic. After your child has started reading a bit more independently, Epic is an amazing resource full of free books and great critical reading questions.
There is a read-to-me feature where the words light up as a speaker reads them (great for learning to read by osmosis.) Many of the boosk also have quizzes to help with critical reading skills. And your child can choose their reading level to make sure they get material they can read. It is a must have for any family who doesn’t mind screen time. Most schools offer a free subscription to Epic. If yours doesn’t, contact us via Modulo and we can put you in our class. - Alphablocks. If your child can’t get enough of shows and youtube videos, the Alphablocks channel is a very fun way to develop phonemic awareness. Make sure to start with level one and proceed level by level. To enhance learning, pause the video each time the letters sound out their names before they say the word so your child can try to guess before they give the answer.
- Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun free app from the Usborne foundation. Personally, I find some of the games a bit complicated, but I know many children who love it and have taught themselves to read this way.
- Duo Lingo ABC is another fun free app that the Duo Lingo just released to help kids learn to read and is a little more straightforward than Teach Your Monster.
- Khan Academy Kids is a wonderful app to learn reading and every other subject. It’s free and for kids ages K-2nd.
If you, like me, get overwhelmed with too many choices, I recommend you start with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, Wild Reading or Homer and then move on to Bob Books. Use Nessy if you think your child is dyslexic.
If you take anything else from this, please remember to be patient with your child and not teach them to read before they’re ready. There’s nothing like a boring reading lesson you’re forced to sit through to kill a lifelong love of learning!
We hope you find a resources that works for you! Feel free to contacts us via the Modulo web-site to give us feedback on these recommendations or tell us about another great one you found!
How to learn to read 3 times faster in 20 minutes
October 6, 2020Education
Grab a book and check the effect for yourself right now.
Iya Zorina
Lifehacker author, athlete, CCM
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0Background: "Project PX"
Back in 1998, Princeton University hosted a seminar "Project PX" (Project PX), dedicated to high speed reading. This article is an excerpt from that seminar and personal experience of speeding up reading.
So, "Project PX" is a three-hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase your reading speed by 386%. It was conducted on people who spoke five languages, and even dyslexics were trained to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.
For comparison, the average reading speed in the US is between 200 and 300 words per minute. We have in connection with the peculiarities of the language - from 120 to 180. And you can easily increase your performance to 700-900 words per minute.
All that is needed is to understand the principles of human vision, what time is wasted in the process of reading and how to stop wasting it.
When we analyze the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster and not mindlessly running your eyes, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.
Preparation
For our experiment you will need:
- a book of at least 200 pages;
- pen or pencil;
- timer.
The book should lie in front of you without closing (press the pages if it tends to close without support).
Find a book that you don't have to hold so that it doesn't closeYou will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.
Helpful Tips
Before jumping straight into the exercises, here are a few quick tips to help you speed up your reading.
1. Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text
When we read, the eyes move through the text not smoothly, but in jumps. Each such jump ends with fixing your attention on a part of the text or stopping your gaze at areas of about a quarter of a page, as if you are taking a picture of this part of the sheet.
Each eye stop on the text lasts ¼ to ½ second.
To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with the tip of your finger, and with the other eye try to slowly slide over the line of text. Jumps become even more obvious if you slide not in letters, but simply in a straight horizontal line:
How do you feel?
2. Try to go back as little as possible through the text
A person who reads at an average pace quite often goes back to reread a missed moment. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns its eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.
On average, conscious and unconscious returns take up to 30% of the time.
3. Improve your concentration to increase the coverage of words read in one stop
People with an average reading speed use a central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision.
Due to this, they perceive half as many words in one jump of vision.
4. Practice the Skills Separately
The exercises are different and you don't have to try to combine them into one. For example, if you are practicing reading speed, don't worry about text comprehension. You will progress through three stages in sequence: learning technique, applying technique to increase speed, and reading comprehension.
Rule of thumb: Practice your technique at three times your desired reading speed. For example, if your current reading speed is somewhere around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, you need to practice reading 900 words per minute.
Exercises
1. Determination of the initial reading speed
Now you have to count the number of words and lines in the book that you have chosen for training. We will calculate the approximate number of words, since calculating the exact value will be too dreary and time consuming.
First, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round it up.
I counted 40 words in five lines: 40 : 5 = 8 - an average of eight words per line.
Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by five. I got 194 lines, I rounded up to 39 lines per page: 195 : 5 = 39.
And the last thing: we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, we multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words per line: 39× 8 = 312.
Now is the time to find out your reading speed. We set a timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.
How much did it turn out? I have a little more than a page - 328 words.
2. Orientation and speed
As I wrote above, returning through the text and stopping the gaze take a lot of time. But you can easily cut them down with a focus tracking tool. A pen, pencil or even your finger will serve as such a tool.
Technique (2 minutes)
Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus.
Move the pencil smoothly under the line you are currently reading and concentrate on where the tip of the pencil is now.
Set the pace with the tip of the pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and returns through the text. And don't worry about understanding, it's a speed exercise.
Try to go through each line in 1 second and increase the speed with each page.
Do not stay on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand what the text is about.
With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, so 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that your vision is ahead of the pencil and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, immediately your vision seems to spread out over the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float all over the sheet.
Speed (3 minutes)
Repeat the tracker technique, but allow no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say "twenty-two").
You probably won't understand anything you read, but that doesn't matter. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not slow down for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the technique for increasing speed.
In the 3 minutes of this frenetic race, I read five pages and 14 lines, averaging 586 words per minute. The hardest part of this exercise is not to slow down the speed of the pencil. It's a real block: you've been reading all your life to understand what you're reading, and it's not easy to let go of that.
Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return to understand what it is about, and the pencil also begins to slow down. It is also difficult to maintain concentration on such useless reading, the brain gives up, and thoughts fly away to hell, which is also reflected in the speed of the pencil.
3. Expanding the area of perception
When you concentrate your eyes on the center of the monitor, you still see its outer areas.
So it is with the text: you concentrate on one word, and you see several words surrounding it.
Now, the more words you learn to see in this way with your peripheral vision, the faster you can read. The expanded area of perception allows you to increase the speed of reading by 300%.
Beginners with a normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the fields, that is, they run their eyes through the letters of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. At the same time, peripheral vision is spent on empty fields, and a person loses from 25 to 50% of the time.
A boosted reader will not "read the fields". He will run his eyes over only a few words from the sentence, and see the rest with peripheral vision. In the illustration below, you see an approximate picture of the concentration of vision of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and foggy ones are marked by peripheral vision.
Focus on central words Here is an example.
Read this sentence:
The students once enjoyed reading for four hours straight.
If you start reading with the word "students" and end with "reading," you save time reading as many as five words out of eight! And this reduces the time for reading this sentence by more than half.
Technique (1 minute)
Use a pencil to read as fast as possible: start with the first word of the line and end with the last. That is, no expansion of the area of perception yet - just repeat exercise No. 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.
Technique (1 minute)
Continue to pace the reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading from the second word of the line and end the line two words before the end.
Speed (3 minutes)
Start reading at the third word of the line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at the speed of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say "twenty-two" ).
If you don't understand anything you read, that's okay. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and you should not worry about understanding. Concentrate on the exercise with all your might and don't let your mind drift away from an uninteresting activity.
4. Testing your new reading speed
Now it's time to test your new reading speed. Set a timer for 1 minute and read as fast as you can while still understanding the text. I got 720 words per minute - twice as fast as before I started using this technique.
These are great figures, but they are not surprising, because you yourself begin to notice how the scope of words has expanded. You don’t waste time on fields, you don’t go back through the text, and the speed increases significantly.
If you've tried this technique right now, share your success in the comments.
How many words per minute did you get before and after?
Read also 📚🤓📖
- What prevents us from reading faster and how to deal with it
- How to read one book a day
- How to teach your child to read: important rules and effective techniques
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How to Learn to Read a Book a Week
It was the end of the 1980s, and I was sitting in a university auditorium listening to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, a writer and leftist activist who scolded our generation for indifference and indifference. Sitting next to me was Gloria Emerson, a brilliant journalist and writer. She and I were discussing Hoffman's performance when I suddenly said that I was simply delighted to be here.
"This is such a unique opportunity," I said, "to participate in the conversations of smart and deep thinkers!"
“Please don't talk nonsense,” she replied.
- Anyone can participate in them. It's enough just to read books!
Ironically, as a history student, in those days I read three or four books a week. And Gloria was right: reading books allowed me to participate equally in the discussions of great minds.
Fast forward a few decades to our own time. I was once again part of these conversations. Ever since I started my podcast, I've been trying to read as much non-fiction as possible—at least one book a week. This is not a whim, but a severe necessity, because, firstly, I need to understand whether I want to talk with the author and share his ideas with the audience. And, secondly, if I still decide to invite him, then our conversation should be interesting. (I admit that this may seem obvious to you, but you would be surprised how often I have been interviewed by people who have not read any of my books.)
This reading enriches me: I gain more knowledge and take more risks. As I do this, I become more confident and understand others better because I see the context of what is happening more clearly.
However, reading takes a lot of time. By the time I decided to read a few books a week, I was already swamped with work. And I also read slowly.
I tried all the speed reading techniques, but none of them worked. Advertising does not clarify the content of the book, and brief annotations are simply mediocre. I have never come across a retelling of a book that gives even a rough idea of what is interesting and useful in the work of the author.
How then can we learn to read one or even several books a week? In my case, the advice that I received at university from my professor of Latin American history (and one of my best teachers) - Michael Jimenez, turned out to be the most effective. Once I complained to him that I could not overcome the huge amount of literature that I needed for my studies.
"I hope you're not trying to read all these books cover to cover like fiction?" - he asked.
I told him yes, that's exactly what I do.
He looked around the audience - my fellow students nodded uncertainly in confirmation of my words.
Then he got everyone together and taught us how to read non-fiction.
“Look,” he began, “there is no need to read these books. All that is required of you is to understand what is written in them.
He further explained to us that works of art require us to be completely immersed in the world created by the author. Non-fiction—at least the kind that supports us in our work as leaders—provides a point of view and asks us to take it into account.
As readers, we pick up the pace from one book to the next. The more we read, the faster we begin to understand the author's views and their place in the invisible dialogue with other experts, and the more informed we become when we take their advice or apply their approaches to our work.
In other words, the more books we read, the faster the process goes.
Here are Professor Jimenez's tips for reading non-fiction, with a few additions from me:
- Start with author .
Who wrote this book? Read his short biography. If you manage to find a short interview with him or an article about him on the Internet, skim through them. This will help you get an idea of his views and beliefs. - Read the book's title, subtitle, back cover comment, and table of contents . What is the main idea of the book? What is the structure of her presentation? By now, you'll probably be able to tell what this book is about to someone who hasn't read it.
- Read the introduction and conclusion of . The author sets out the essence of the matter in his introductory and concluding arguments. Read both of these sections in their entirety, but try not to dwell on them for too long. You already have a rough idea of what the author is getting at, and these sections will tell you how he plans to get to his conclusions (introduction) and what he hopes to get across to you (conclusion).
- Read/skip each chapter .
Read the title and the first few paragraphs or pages of the chapter. Your task is to understand what the purpose of this chapter is and how it fits into the main idea of the book. Then go over the subheadings (if any) to get an idea of the development of the author's thought. Read the first and last sentences in each paragraph. If you understand the meaning, move on. Otherwise, you should probably read the entire paragraph. Having understood the main essence of the chapter, you will be able to skim through entire pages of the book, since the author’s system of arguments will already be clear to you, and the arguments themselves can be repeated several times. - When you finish the book, go over the table of contents again . After reading the book in this way, go back to the table of contents and make a summary of it in your head. Once again mentally go through the book: revive in your memory the ideas that you paid attention to, the stories that you remember, the path that you have traveled with the author.
As I read, I take notes in preparation for an upcoming meeting with the author. Where do I agree with him? Where do our opinions differ? What questions do I have and need clarification? What would I like to discuss with other people or think about in the future? Such notes are very useful to any reader.
And here's something else that's interesting: despite the fact that this kind of reading goes much faster than the traditional one (it takes me one or two hours to read one book, instead of the usual six or eight), much more information is stored in your head .
And the point is that you are not just reading the material, you are actively interacting with it. Your mind is in a constant state of readiness, and you perceive the book more holistically. You do not just passively absorb the text you read, you comprehend it.
When I started my podcast, I wanted to give people an outsider's view of the conversations I have with thoughtful intellectuals about their passions, research, and perspectives.
