How easy and fun is it to teach a child to read in English?

Charming Olga Antonovna Moskova talks about how her manual “English Reading Trainer with Rules, Transcription and Learning Exercises for Development of Fluent Reading and Correct Pronunciation” was born.

My father helped me with school lessons. In particular, he checked how well I learned the vocabulary material before the English dictation. I remember how he almost brought me to tears, assuring me that I was pronouncing the word incorrectly: the book said one thing, and I said something completely different. The thing was just that dad did not know English, at one time he studied German. Therefore, what he saw on the page of the textbook, in his opinion, did not agree with what I said.

How many times in a conversation with a teacher do parents ruefully say: “We learned German/French/Spanish at school, so we can’t help our child with English at all”?! And the child is often looking forward to this help, because on his own he can’t get through the intricacies of English letters and their combinations: “Mom, why is BUT pronounced like Ealthough it has just been read as HEY. And then there’s the sound Falthough the letters F No?»

Today, in foreign language lessons at school, the emphasis is primarily on oral speech: most textbooks have a mandatory oral introductory module, the language is studied through ready-made cliché phrases that help to conduct a dialogue. And rightly so, because the main goal of learning any foreign language is the development of communication skills. But being able to read aloud and to yourself, to pronounce words correctly is also very important.

There are reading rules in English, knowing which, you can easily learn to read, at least those words that are needed to master the language at an elementary level. By the way, the essence of one of the tasks of the VLOOKUP in English is precisely to accurately read an unfamiliar text aloud. In modern school textbooks, exercises for practicing reading rules are often not enough, and the teacher has to select additional material. This, of course, is not very convenient.

Now my eldest daughter is in elementary school, and I really wanted to help her and turn reading practice from monotonous word reading into an exciting game. So I had three tasks:

1) to give parents who do not know or do not remember English a simple and convenient tool with which they can help their children,

2) to create a manual that my colleagues could use in their lessons to practice reading skills,

3) turn the study of difficult reading rules into an exciting adventure for the children themselves.

I have been working at the school for 14 years and have accumulated enough experience to kill these three birds with one stone. This is how my reading trainer was born.

All lessons in it are built according to a certain structure: first, the child gets acquainted with a letter or a combination of letters, then he trains to read, then he definitely plays, practicing the initial writing skills. At the end of the lesson, the results are necessarily summed up and achievements are recorded on a special ladder of success, because it is very important for every child to realize that he succeeded and praise himself for it.

The simulator has a lot of funny illustrations, and all the important reading elements are highlighted in color, so it’s easier to navigate the words and fix the rule being studied. All rules are explained in Russian, in especially difficult cases there are tips. And for responsible parents, at the end of the simulator are answers to written tasks.

With the simulator, learning to read is easy and fun, I know this firsthand!