Guided Reading Lessons
Guided reading lessons give you the game plan you need when you are teaching reading. If you lack a plan of action or are without guided reading lessons while trying to teach a child to read, it is easy to miss something you need to teach.
For example, when I first started teaching my son the phonics sounds, the flash cards that I was using did not have certain phonetic groupings of letters that I realized he needed to be taught (such as ar, er, ur, ir, ay, ey, ea, ee, ai, oa, ing, ly, etc.).
I found this out because the little text book reader that I was trying to teach him from had many combinations of letter sounds that he did not know. So every night, I would literally sound out each word in the story that we were supposed to be going through.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it was not knowing what words he should know as sight words and trying to figure out the different combinations of letters and their sounds that he needed to know to read the story!
In order to avoid all the hassle and aggravation that I faced, you need to use a reading program that clearly tells you each sight word and phonics sound that your child needs to know before they start reading the story they are assigned. You would think that this would be common sense for reading programs to include, but I assure you that many reading programs do not have these instructions clearly and simply laid out so that you can easily assess what your child needs to know before they dive into a particular book. The result is that your child becomes very easily frustrated because they are given a story to read with words and sounds that they have not been taught.
This situation quickly demotivates your child and discourages them from wanting to read. To help your child develop a love for reading they need to feel successful at reading from the start. In practical terms, this means using guided reading lessons and giving your child beginners books to read that they can read by themselves because they know all the sounds and sight words used in the book.
