Teach Your Child to Read in 15 Minutes a Day, with Help Me Reader

We came up with the idea for the Help Me Reader App while teaching our second child to read. We are now using it as the primary instruction tool to teach our third child to read. There are no books to pull out, worksheets to print and copy, flash cards to sort. Those things have their uses, but when I have 15 minutes to do a lesson and don't want to spend that time in lesson prep, all I have to do is grab a tablet and a lesson is ready for us.

Teaching reading takes a lot of time and a lot of repetition. I hear people concerned that their 6 or 7 year old can't read after working on it for weeks. A matter of weeks is not enough time to expect your child to learn to read. You should expect to spend months teaching reading before seeing significant progress. But when the lessons are short and fun, your daily reading lesson can be a joy. Here are my suggestions on how to teach your child to read in only 15 minutes a day.

• Don't start too young – I was super eager to start teaching our first child. We were in preschool co-ops, did every mommy-n-me play group, library time, tumbling time, and meet-up. The list could go on and on, and what I learned from all that busyness - it is such a waste of time. They will not make your child smarter, or better, or give them a competitive advantage. It will just make them tired and you broke. If you try to teach your 2 year old to read, you will be frustrated and work against your ultimate goal of teaching them to love learning. You can teach a 4 year old to read, but evidence shows that they will have no advantage by the time they are 11 over the child who didn't learn to read until they were 6 or 7. Further, education researchers question to potential consequences pressing reading too early1.

• Minimize distractions - our household is loud and busy. I can't make it distraction-free, but I put little brother down for nap, get an older kid to play with the baby, and set anyone else hanging around on chores or send them outside. Inevitably, someone will wonder in, but my focus is on the child I'm working with at that moment. We've had these discussions many times and will have many more in the future, but all my kids know that they get my attention when I'm doing a lesson with them. Now it's time to show the same consideration to our newest student.

• 15 minute lessons in 5 minute increments – The first 5 minutes are spent reviewing 5 letter sounds. All of last year was spent introducing a letter a week and learning its sounds. We hang letters on the wall of our dining room, color letter pictures and point out the letters whenever we see it in print. We use the Letter Sounds book included free with the app to review the sounds and make sure they are fresh in her mind. Next, we spend only 5 minutes on a book. The Cat Had a Plan is a perfect place to start, also included free with the app. In that 5 minutes, we only cover 1 new page, and go back and read the book up to the new page we've just introduced. As we read each word, I help her sound out each letter, then the syllable, then put the sounds together to read the word. She taps on the word to see if she knows the sound or to hear the sound if she didn't know it. Finally, I give her 5 minutes to play with the app by herself. She looks at pictures and plays with the words she knows. She usually has a favorite illustration she wants to find. After 5 minutes of playing with the app by herself, I take it away and say that we are all done for the day. She wants to “read” more, but keeping the time short keeps her interested and eager to do her reading lesson again tomorrow.

That's it. After Letter Sounds and The Cat Had a Plan. Letter Blends and Beth and Ben's Hen are good books to try next. You may then want to return to The Cat Had a Plan again before moving on to another book. Don't worry about your child getting it quickly, but make a little progress every week. Don't measure your progress daily, but see if you're doing any better at the end of the month than you were at the beginning. If they just don't seem to be getting it, take a month off and just review letter sounds. A different aptitude doesn't mean less intelligent, and a lover of learning is far superior to reading above grade level.

1Suggate, Sebastian, P. 2012. “Watering the garden before the rainstorm: The case of early reading.” Edited by Sebastian Suggate and Elaine Reese. Contemporary debates in child development and education. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. pp. 181-190.