Teach child to read free

About Us - Teach Your Monster

We’re Teach Your Monster, a non-profit that creates magical, fun-filled learning games for kids.

With the help of friendly monsters, playful design and out-of-this-world storytelling, we work with leading academics to create beautifully crafted games kids love to play.

Trusted by teachers and parents, our innovative products aim to engage even the most reluctant of learners.

The Usborne Foundation

We’re part of The Usborne Foundation — a charity set up by Peter Usborne CBE of Usborne Publishing to support early years learning.

We believe every child should have the opportunity to reach their full potential in early years and beyond.

Since launch in 2012 Teach Your Monster to Read has...

The Teach Your Monster story

Usborne Publishing is an independent, family-run business which has been sparking children’s curiosity and love of reading around the world since 1973. In 2011, company founder Peter Usborne CBE, along with his daughter Nicola and son Martin established the Usborne Foundation with the aim of developing creative and innovative responses to the biggest challenges facing early years education.

The start of this journey was the creation of Teach Your Monster to Read, a game that would come to help over 30 million children on the first crucial steps of their reading journey. Since launch it has been played over 300 million times, helps two million children learn to read every month and received BAFTA nominations in 2013 and 2015.

In 2021 we changed our name to Teach Your Monster to represent our growing family of games. We are now helping children tackle a diverse range of learning challenges in new and exciting ways, from numeracy to nutrition.

As an organisation we are proud of our methodology which puts children at the center of the creative process. Our creative teams are given support to become experts in the chosen field working in close collaboration with expert educational advisors. Player testing in classrooms is built into the process from the very start.

All this comes together in beautifully crafted stories, compelling characters and engaging game play as we create learning adventures that kids will come want to come back to play again and again.

Who do we work with?

We take the process of making our games and creating our monsters very seriously. We bring together world-leading education experts working to work in close collaboration with highly creative talent from diverse backgrounds — game developers, animators, designers, authors and musicians.

Our long-standing relationship with Roehampton University has helped us understand early years literacy and are expanding to work with other academic partners as we build into new areas of learning.

Join the Monsters

We are always looking for great people to collaborate with as we build and develop our games. We operate an ongoing recruitment process to help us find new talent and diversify our teams. You can find out more about this on our openings page.

Teach Your Child to Read at Home

It’s time to teach my child to read! It is a big undertaking, but I feel ready now that I have this list of resources to help me on my journey. If you are looking for ideas on how to begin and what to use, this will be a huge help!

This post contains affiliate links

I have decided to get more structured with teaching Evan letter sounds and progressing towards teaching him to read. In my quest to do this, I have done a TON of research into programs that will help me carry this out. Since I am a blogger, the first thing I did was turn to my fellow kid bloggers to see what they had to offer in this area. I scoured all over and read a ridiculous amount of blog posts, but I am so happy I did because I have found some awesome reading programs that can be printed out and used easily at home. On top of that, they are free or very affordable. I am so excited to share them with you today. I am hoping they will be a great resource to you in your quest to educate your child!

First, I want to share two very informative posts on how to teach your child to read. If you feel lost about where to begin and how to make it all happen, I highly recommend you read these.

How Do I Teach My Child to Read? by Carisa at 1+1+1=1

Tips for Teaching Letters and Letter Sounds by at Becky at This Reading Mama

If your child still needs to work on learning letter sounds, this free curriculum called Learning the Alphabet from This Reading Mama is a great place to start. It is fun and playful and will hold the attention of young preschool learners. We plan on using this, printables from other bloggers and continuing the play-based learning activities we’ve been doing to review and reinforce letter recognition and letter sounds before beginning the programs below.

Once your child knows the letters and their sounds, you can begin a program that will help you teach your child to read. I really like Reading the Alphabet from This Reading Mama. It is still fun and playful while at the same time teaching phonics, sight words and more! Plus, it is completely free! It looks awesome and I am really looking forward to using it.

If you plan on using this curriculum, you will want to check out these phonics books from The Measured Mom. They were made to use alongside the Reading the Alphabet curriculum.

I also came across this fantastic program designed by Carisa at 1+1+1=1 called You Can Read!. It focuses on teaching sight words in a way that will be interesting and enjoyable for young children. I plan to use this with Reading the Alphabet. They don’t match up completely, but I plan to piece them together as much as possible.

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In addition, I plan on using BOB Books to facilitate the whole process. The BOB Books are not free, but they are very reasonably priced. I think they will be a great way to help Evan actually read the sounds and sight words he is learning while using the programs above.

These free BOB books printables from 3 Dinosaurs are wonderful and are a great hands-on way to work out the lessons taught in the BOB Books.

This Reading Mama also has a ton of printables to go along with the BOB Books. They look so fun!

We will also use Starfall.com. I really love it so far. We have tried many online reading programs and Evan likes this one the best. Most of the lessons are free if you use your laptop or computer. However, I prefer to let Evan use our Kindle, so I am paying $35 per year for the membership since it gives us access to the lessons via their app on Kindle. The membership also opens up some additional lessons. From what I hear though, the free content is plenty for kids at this level. So if you don’t mind doing these on your desktop or laptop computer, the free version should be enough for you.

We will also continue to use Leapfrog Letter Factory. Evan loves it and it really is effective. We are just about to begin Talking Words Factory. After that we will use Leapfrog: Word Caper.

I will also integrate more learning apps on our Kindle. I plan to do a post on that in the near future, so stay tuned for that if you have a Kindle.

I still plan on continuing to develop and use many play-based learning activities to teach and reinforce these reading skills as well. I have lots of fun and exciting learning games and activities coming up. I even plan on adapting many of the lessons from the programs above so that Evan still has plenty of chances to move and learn!

I’ve listed a lot here, but plan to pick and choose a little bit of each thing and adjust as we go along. If this seems overwhelming to you, I would love to have you follow along. I plan to blog about what we do each week and how it all comes together. I hope to make it a resource that you can easily follow and implement with your child.

If you would like to stay up to date with what we are doing, I highly recommend signing up for my email newsletter. I send an email out about once a week. In addition, I would love for you to share what you are doing with your kids in the comments here on the blog and also on social media. I hope we can be an encouragement to each other!

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How to teach your child to read: important rules and effective techniques

October 26LikbezEducation

Teaching a preschooler to read without losing interest in books is real. Lifehacker has selected the best ways for responsible parents.

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How to understand that it's time to teach your child to read

There are several signs of psychological readiness.

1. The child speaks fluently in sentences and understands the meaning of what is said.
2. The child understands directions: left-right, up-down. For learning to read, it is important that the baby can follow the text from left to right and from top to bottom.
3. The child distinguishes sounds (what speech therapists call developed phonemic hearing). Simply put, the baby will easily understand by ear where the house and the bow are, and where the tom and the hatch are.
4. Your child pronounces all the sounds and has no speech problems.

Natalya Zharikova

Speech therapist with 33 years of experience

A child with speech therapy problems does not hear and does not distinguish similar sounds. From here come errors with speech, and subsequently with reading, and even more often with writing. It is very difficult for a parent to identify violations on their own, so usually a teacher or a speech therapist can point this out to them.

How to teach your child to read

Be patient and follow these simple guidelines.

Set an example

In a family where there is a culture and tradition of reading, children themselves will reach for books. Read not because it is necessary and useful, but because it is a pleasure for you.

Read together and discuss

Read aloud to the child and then look at the pictures together, encouraging them to interact with the book: “Who is that drawn? Can you show me the cat's ears? And who is that standing next to her?” Older children can be asked more difficult questions: “Why did he do this? What do you think will happen next?"

Don't learn the letters as they are called in the alphabet

Instead, help your child remember the sound the letter makes. For example, you show the letter "m" and say: "This is the letter m (not em )". If a child remembers the alphabetic names of letters ( em , es, ef and so on), it will be quite difficult for him to learn to read. Then, when he sees the word ra-ma in the book, he will try to pronounce er-a-um-ah .

Go from simple to complex

Once the child has memorized a few letters (from 2 to 5) and the sounds they represent, move on to syllables. Let the words consisting of repeating syllables be the first: ma-ma, pa-pa, uncle, nanny . In this case, it is not necessary to break the syllable into separate sounds. Do not say: "These are the letters m and a , and together they read ma ". Immediately learn that the syllable is pronounced like ma , otherwise the baby may start to read letter by letter. After mastering simple combinations, move on to more complex ones: ko‑t, zhu‑k, house .

Help to understand the meaning of what they read

Do this when the child begins to slowly but surely reproduce words and whole sentences in syllables. For example, the kid read: "Mom washed the frame." Stop and ask: “What did you just read about?”. If he finds it difficult to answer, let him read the sentence again. And you ask more specific questions: “Who washed the frame? What did mom wash?

Show that letters are everywhere

Play a game. Let the child find the letters that surround him on the street and at home. These are the names of stores, and memos on information stands, and advertising on billboards, and even traffic light messages: it happens that the inscription “Go” lights up on green, and “Wait so many seconds” on red.

Play

And play again. Stack blocks with letters and syllables, make up words, ask your child to read you some kind of sign or inscription on the packaging in the store.

Natalya Zharikova

There are many exercises for memorizing letters. For example, circle the desired letter among a number of others, circle the correctly written among the incorrect ones, color or shade. You can also ask the child to tell what the letter looks like.

Use every opportunity to train

Whether you are waiting in line at the clinic or driving somewhere, take out a book with pictures and short stories to them and invite your child to read together.

Build on your success

Repeat familiar texts, look for familiar characters in new stories. Runaway Bunny is found both in "Teremka" and "Kolobok".

Do not force

This is perhaps the most important thing. Don't take away a child's childhood. Learning should not go through violence and tears.

What techniques to use to teach your child to read

Here are six popular, affordable and effective techniques. Choose one or try several and choose the one that interests your child the most.

1. ABCs and primers

Traditional, but the longest way. The difference between these books is that the alphabet fixes each letter with a mnemonic picture: on the page with B a drum will be drawn, and next to Yu - spinning top. The alphabet helps to remember letters and often interesting rhymes, but will not teach you how to read.

The primer consistently teaches the child to combine sounds into syllables, and syllables into words. This process is not easy and requires perseverance.

There are quite a lot of author's primers now. According to the books of Nadezhda Betenkova, Vseslav Goretsky, Dmitry Fonin, Natalya Pavlova, children can study both with their parents before school and in the first grade.

Parents agree that one of the most understandable methods for teaching preschoolers is Nadezhda Zhukova's primer. The author simply explains the most difficult thing for a child: how to turn letters into syllables, how to read ma-ma rather than start calling individual letters me-a-me-a .

2. Zaitsev's Cubes

If a child consistently learns letters and syllables while learning from an ABC book, then in 52 Zaitsev's Cubes he is given access to everything at once: a single letter or combinations of consonant and vowel, consonant and hard or soft sign.

The child effortlessly learns the differences between unvoiced and voiced sounds, because the cubes with voiceless consonants are filled with wood, and the cubes with voiced consonants are filled with metal.

The cubes also differ in size. The large ones depict hard warehouses, the small ones - soft ones. The author of the technique explains this by the fact that when we pronounce to (hard warehouse), the mouth opens wide, or (soft warehouse) - lips in a half smile.

The set includes tables with warehouses that the parent sings (yes, he doesn’t speak, but sings).

The child quickly masters warehouse reading with the help of cubes. But there are also disadvantages: he may begin to swallow endings and face difficulties already at school when parsing a word by composition.

3. "Skladushki" and "Teremki" by Vyacheslav Voskobovich

In "Skladushki" Vyacheslav Voskobovich reworked Zaitsev's idea: 21 cards show all the warehouses of the Russian language with nice thematic pictures. Included is a CD with songs, the texts of which go under each picture.

Folders are great for kids who like looking at pictures. Each of them is an occasion to discuss with the child where the kitten is, what the puppy is doing, where the beetle flew.

It is possible to teach a child with these cards from the age of three. At the same time, it should be noted that the author of the methodology himself does not consider it necessary to force early development.

"Teremki" by Voskobovich consist of 12 wooden cubes with consonants and 12 cardboard cubes with vowels. First, the child gets acquainted with the alphabet and tries with the help of parents to come up with words that begin with each of the letters.

Then it's time to study the syllables. In the tower with the letter M is inserted into A - and the first syllable is ma . From several towers you can lay out words. Learning is based on play. So, when replacing the vowel , the house will turn into smoke .

You can start playing tower blocks from the age of two. At the same time, parents will not be left alone with the cubes: the kit includes a manual with a detailed description of the methodology and game options.

4. Chaplygin's dynamic cubes

Evgeny Chaplygin's manual includes 10 cubes and 10 movable blocks. Each dynamic block consists of a pair - a consonant and a vowel. The task of the child is to twist the cubes and find a pair.

At the initial stage, as with any other method of learning to read in warehouses, the child makes the simplest words from repeating syllables: ma-ma, pa-pa, ba-ba . The involved motor skills help to quickly remember the shape of the letters, and the search for already familiar syllables turns into an exciting game. The cubes are accompanied by a manual describing the methodology and words that can be composed.

The optimal age for classes is 4-5 years. You can start earlier, but only in the game format.

5. Doman's cards

American doctor Glenn Doman suggests teaching children not individual letters or even syllables, but whole words. Parents name and show the child the words on the cards for 1-2 seconds. In this case, the baby is not required to repeat what he heard.

Classes start with 15 cards with the simplest concepts like female and male . Gradually, the number of words increases, those already learned leave the set, and the child begins to study phrases: for example, color + object, size + object.

How can one understand that a child has understood and memorized the visual image of a word, if the author of the methodology recommends starting classes from birth? Glenn Doman in "The Harmonious Development of the Child" strongly emphasizes that it is not necessary to arrange tests and checks for the child: kids do not like this and lose interest in classes.

It's better to remember 50 cards out of 100 than 10 out of 10.

Glenn Doman

But given that parents can't help but check, he advises the child to play the game if they want and are ready. For example, you can put a few cards and ask to bring one or point to it.

Today, psychologists, neurophysiologists and pediatricians agree that the Doman method is aimed not at teaching reading, but at mechanical memorization of visual images of words. The child turns out to be an object of learning and is almost deprived of the opportunity to learn something on his own.

It is also worth adding: in order to proceed to the stage of reading according to Doman, parents need to prepare cards with all (!) Words that are found in a particular book.

6. Montessori method

Montessori reading comes from the opposite: first we write and only then we read. Letters are the same pictures, so you first need to learn how to draw them and only then engage in pronunciation and reading. Children begin by tracing and shading the letters, and through this, they memorize their outline. When several vowels and consonants have been studied, they move on to the first simple words.

Much attention is paid to the tactile component, so children can literally touch the alphabet cut out of rough or velvety paper.

The value of the methodology lies in learning through play. So, you can put a rough letter and a plate of semolina in front of the child and offer to first circle the sign with your finger, and then repeat this on the semolina.

The difficulty for parents is to purchase or prepare a significant amount of handouts. But you can try to make cards with your own hands from cardboard and sandpaper.

What's the result

On the Internet and on posters advertising "educators", you will be offered ultra-modern methods of teaching your child to read at three, two or even from birth. But let's be realistic: a happy mother is needed a year, not developmental activities.

The authors of the methods as one insist that the most natural learning process for a child is through play, and not through classes in which the parent plays the role of a strict controller. Your main assistant in learning is the curiosity of the child himself.

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