Teaching very young children to read. (long)

[faithbased]

Opinions are fine. (You can give an educated guess if you aren't an experienced early years teacher.)


I've been teaching my four year old daughter to read since she was two. We use a method of sounding words which is a lot like phonics but not so formal or complicated. (You could call it common sense phonics.) It works just fine as one might expect. She can read pretty well as her teachers and school reading helpers have verified and is currently being raised through the school reading levels. So far so good.

But I've been having trouble finding library books of the correct reading level for her. I've bought a series of very short Winnie the Pooh books from a charity shop. They were 20p each so I bought all of them. The vocabulary in them is sometimes difficult. The books contain words like "championship". Luckily such words are relatively rare. Most of the words are perfectly manageable for her. When she approaches an unusually long word she has a tendency to guess what the word says, sometimes with no relevance whatsoever. She might guess championship as "happened." When we sound the word out bit by bit she eventually reads it properly.

It's unusual for us to read books which have complex vocabulary in them. But I don't want her to develop a strategy of taking wild guesses at words. (She doesn't generally do that at the moment and I don't want her to start.) I'm planning to stick with the new Winnie the Pooh books for the next week or fortnight or so. But if I suspect that she's developing a taste for wild and erratic guessing then I'm going to junk the books. Does anybody agree with the idea of junking them? Or would people continue with vocabulary which was easily manageable in the main with the occasional difficult word?

[emsr2d2]

Personally, I'd continue with them. A point will come when she will recognise the word "championship" for what it is. Whether that's because she has simply memorised the appearance of the word along with its pronunciation, or if she has actually learnt to "read" it is somewhat academic.
My only suggestion would be to make it clear to her that you know when she is just guessing so if she has absolutely no idea what the word says, don't guess, but ask you to pronounce it out for her and learn it together.
If the word starts with "ch" and you hear her start to say a word starting "ha" then you can instantly stop her and say "No, it doesn't start with the "ha" sound, does it?"
I only had limited experience with a 4-year-old child when I taught in Madrid but her parents had given her a good basis and I found that the system above worked well. She realised very quickly that it wasn't worth just making a wild guess because I could tell instantly that that was what she was doing.