READING CAN BE PUZZLING: BEGINNER

This is a beginner reading course for kids who are not yet reading independently. The entire course is a collection of all of my "Reading Can Be Puzzling" courses and lessons for students to scale in their reading abilities from complete beginners to reading at a 1st grade level.

This course is completely student-paced or on demand, meaning that there are no live lessons with a teacher.

If you need feedback, advice, or a 1:1 live assessment, please send me a message and I will get back to you within 24 hours with an answer!

The general completion time for this course is about 20 weeks, but since it is self-paced, you can go at your speed. The younger your child is, the longer it will likely take them. If they're a bit older, it may take less time. 

I recommend learners complete 3 lessons per week.

Unit 1 is cumulative, meaning you must follow the order of the lessons, but Units 2, 3, 4, and 5 are non-cumulative, so you can jump around within those units. The units are also in order of difficulty.


WHAT TOPICS WILL BE COVERED?

Short Vowel Sounds: CVC word blending and decoding

It matters the order in which we teach reading. Starting with simple blending of real words is very helpful for kids because it gives them something tangible to relate the word to. Unit 1 will go over just one short vowel and 2 consonants in the beginning and will slowly start to incorporate blends. Unit 2 is full of non-cumulative lessons of blending CVC words and using beginner sentences.

Long Vowel Sounds: Long vowel spellings that we commonly use in English

Long vowel pairs and spellings are the most difficult concept for my beginner readers. They just learned all of the short vowels and how to blend, and now we're telling them a whole bunch of exceptions. Unit 3 covers the most common spellings for all of the long vowel sounds and vowel teams.

Sight Words (Popcorn Words): These are the words that are much harder to sound out phonetically, but in order to make beginner sentences, these are need to know words.

You will see all throughout the course that there are sight words (popcorn words) included in every lesson, so kids can start the work on linear reading, which is to only read the words they see and to read them in order. Sight words are difficult for beginner readers because they often do not make sense phonetically. Therefore, I have a process that makes it simple for kids to remember the words and even how to use them properly since they're paired with a silly definitions for learners to actually understand.

Comprehension and Fluency: Answering questions about the text your learner read and reading at a proper speed, using intonation, and recognizing punctuation.

Units 4 and 5 are full of kindergarten and 1st grade scored books for your learner to work on reading actual books with brand new vocabulary. I personally loved leveled readers because this is how books are actually written! They will see words they've never recognized before, so they need to have the skills to sound them out and the comprehension to make it make sense to them given the context of the story.