We’re often told by schools to trust the process, but when your child is guessing and struggling to spell simple words, that advice feels empty. If you’ve been searching for how to teach reading in a way that actually works, you’ve likely realized that more of the same isn’t the answer.
As an ALTA-certified Orton-Gillingham Tutor, I spend my days working with kids who are often described as “mysteries.” These are students in upper elementary grades who are incredibly smart but are hitting a wall. Teachers see that there’s an issue but many teachers haven’t been trained in child literacy. Ironically, parents rely on teachers to be the experts in teaching child literacy and share thoughts on how they can help their child succeed. It creates a loop of frustration.
Many schools still use a balanced literacy approach. For about a third of kids, it works okay. But for too many others, this approach is like trying to build a house by looking at a picture of a finished mansion. You end up guessing where everything goes. Sometimes it works but mostly you end up with a hot mess.
So when we talk about child literacy and want to know how to teach reading, we need to move away from programs that promote guessing. That’s when your child sees a word starting with ‘b’, looks at the picture of a bear on the page, and yells “Grizzly!” That’s not reading; that’s high-level detective work, and it’s exhausting. Our kids don’t need to be detectives; they need to be code-breakers.
If you want to see this in action head over to YouTube and search for the video Purple Challenge by a CA parent whose child was reading a story with the word purple. This parent is also a neuropsychologist who understood a few things about child literacy!
To truly understand how to teach reading, we have to look at the Science of Reading. This isn’t just a buzzword; it’s decades of research into how the brain actually learns to process text (read). It’s building curricula that is based upon this information.
Schools select a reading curriculum, it costs a lot of money so the administrators at the school then expect the teachers to use the curriculum when going about how to teach reading. In theory, this is a good thing if the curriculum that is used by the school is based upon evidence-based child literacy, and how to teach reading. Unfortunately, there are quite a few curricula out there that aren’t developed around how to teach reading to kids.
When analyzing how to teach reading to our kids, we want a program that is:
There is one more element that cements the learning for many of our kids. We add a multisensory component. We don’t just look at the letters. We hear the sound, we say the sound, and we feel the letter. We might “sky-write” the letter ‘b’ in the air using big arm movements. We engage multiple areas of the brain and improve learning.
Before diving into specific programs, let’s discuss the relationship between reading and spelling.
People often think reading and spelling are the same thing. A better way is to think of reading and spelling as two sides of the same coin. Reading is decoding (taking the code apart), while spelling is encoding (putting the code together). Each one occurs in a different part of the brain.
In fact, spelling is much harder for the brain. It requires a higher level of orthographic mapping (the process the brain uses to store printed words in long-term memory.) If you want to know how to teach spelling, you have to stop focusing on spelling lists and start teaching patterns.
Instead of memorizing 20 random words for a test that will be forgotten the next day, you want to teach why words are spelled the way they are. Why is there a ‘ck’ at the end of the word truck but just a ‘k’ at the end of the word pink? Surprise, surprise, there’s a rule for that! And when your child learns the rule, they don’t just learn one word; they learn hundreds! So let’s get to the specific programs so you discover how to teach reading like a pro.
I’m a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. You are a busy parent; you don’t have a teaching degree. You simply want to know how to teach reading and how to teach spelling to your child. There isn’t ANY need to create your own curriculum from scratch.
The good news is that you don’t need to. Here are three programs:
This is the gold standard for many homeschoolers for a reason. It’s an open-and-go program meaning you don’t need a PhD in linguistics to use it. It uses letter tiles to make the concepts physical and tactile.
UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) has taken the literacy world by storm recently. It is incredibly high-quality, research-based, and very affordable. It’s a systematic phonics program that is easy to follow and very effective for intervention.
This is a heavily scripted, Orton-Gillingham based curriculum specifically designed for struggling readers and kids with dyslexia. It’s very easy to use at home.
If you’ve been thinking about how to help your child, start by taking a baby step. Pick one of the 3 programs in this post and investigate it further. You don’t need to make a decision right now. You are simply checking out some options.
We can help your child become a better reader and speller. Contact us for a free consultation.
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