(This post contains affiliate links.)
(This post contains affiliate links.)
Can I tell you something?
I love teaching my kids to read.
I’m crazy about it.
A lot of people see all my reading posts and think I homeschool my kids. (I don’t. It’s on my About page.)
The truth is that I teach my kids to read before kindergarten because I don’t want their teachers to have all the fun.
Watching that little “I can read!” light bulb go on was my favorite part of classroom teaching – and I’m so thankful I get to see the light go on for my own kids.
How I teach my kids read
Recently I began using a preschool reading curriculum with my Four.
We have a very light approach – we do activities 3-5 days per week for about 15 minutes each day.
I choose activities from Reading the Alphabet, add my own, and spend most of our time on simple sight word books – like the ones I’ll be sharing today.
I should tell you that my Four already knew the word the when we began the lesson.
After spending the last year brushing up on concepts of print with our pocket chart sentences and voice to print cards, he has the very basic sight words down (a, I, the, and see). But since I’m interested in giving him confidence as we start our reading journey, I decided to start with those words anyway.
To begin, we did this word find page from Reading the Alphabet.
Reading the Alphabet focuses on a letter sound for each lesson. My Four knows his letter sounds very well, but this handwriting page was very useful!
He’s pretty sharp math-wise, but I thought it would be good to review the teen numbers with this Reading the Alphabet printable.
Now it was time for the books! Each simple sight word book set comes with four books featuring a single sight word. This first book is about vegetables.
This book was about camping.
School supplies.
And finally, construction.
These books are very simple on purpose. They help kids learn voice to print (each word they say matches up to a word on the page), recognize simple sight words (in this case, the), and use beginning sounds and picture clues to figure out unknown words.
In the download below, you’ll get the color version of this book. If you’d like to purchase all the books at once, you’ll get both a color and print version of all 104 books!
How to assemble:
(for a video tutorial, see this page)
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- Print pages 2-9 front to back (page 1 is my Terms of Use). Print in color or grayscale.
- Cut across the horizontal center of each page.
- Insert one set of pages into the other, paying attention to the page numbers.
- Staple with a long-armed stapler.
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Carolyn Shumate
Thank you for everything that you have shared!
Anna G
You’re very welcome, Carolyn!