Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

My first product review is, fittingly, on my favorite product: a book I can’t live without as a homeschool mom.SampleYes, it really is as simple as it sounds. I bought this book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelmann, when my oldest child was four and a half. I taught him, along with his five year old friend, how to read, in less than four months, just doing twenty minutes a day. They were at about a second grade reading level when they finished. I’m currently teaching my five year old daughter (who only has one month until she’s done) and also my very bright 3 and a half year old daughter, who is just beginning.

I really love that this book stands alone. You don’t need any fancy computer program or flash cards or any other bells and whistles. This book, which I bought brand new at Barnes & Noble for $20, along with a sheet of paper and pencil, is it. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is brilliant.

This book, which is the DISTAR reading program (Direct Instruction - parts to whole, logical progression), has been involved in over a dozen comparative studies, including an enormous educational study done by the U.S. Department of Education, and guess what? It outperforms them all. Don’t ask me why every public school in the country isn’t using this system, because I don’t have the time or energy to rant and rave about public education. Do you wonder why I homeschool my kids?

Do NOT skip the first 27 pages of this book, which is the Introduction and Parent’s Guide. It’s invaluable, and you cannot teach this correctly without carefully reading that material. You do NOT have to be a reading teacher to teach your child to read, and in fact, you will know more about teaching reading than most teachers out there by the time you’ve gone through this book with your child. I happen to be a former public school teacher, and have my Master’s in Teaching. But I learned nothing valuable about teaching reading in my educational training, not even when I was a reading specialist! There IS a right way to teach reading, and it’s very systematic, and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons lays out the sequence better than I have ever seen.

This is a scripted program, and there’s a reason for that. Every detail is covered, right down to how to effectively correct any type of mistake the child makes. You’ve got to understand that this program was tested on thousands of children, and you benefit from all of those trials. So don’t feel like you don’t have the “freedom” to teach how you want; the truth is that you have so much more freedom to have fun with your child, and you can heap on the praise, because your child has received the absolute most effective communication from you (through the script), and will be successful.

I’ve seen different educational tools out there that claim to work “like magic.” Well, I don’t think Zig Engelmann has ever made that claim, but I’ll make it for him! My kids all have such differing “learning styles” but this book works for everyone. So, if you’ve been cutting and pasting together your reading program for your child, or you’re just hoping he’ll figure it out by reading to him a lot, then this book would seem like magic, because what you’re doing won’t work (at least not well).