Reading about teaching reading

I have just finished reading the Endeavour Reading Programme Teacher's Manual Pre Reading to Stage 18, and returned it to my library.

It was very helpful to read the teacher's manual, since I am using this series of readers with Anna, and also supplementing Joshua's school literacy experiences with them over the holidays. I wrote a bit about the readers and teacher's manual earlier.

All I wanted to add today is a word of encouragement:
If you are trying to teach your children to read, and you are using a series or set of readers that has one, you should consider reading the Teacher's Manual!

You will gain insight into the way that the series was constructed that may help you to order your use of the books. You will also gain insight into the way the series was intended to be used, according to its creators, so you will probably gain ideas for your own teaching.

You may also gain ideas on assessing your child's reading skills (this TM has a great checklist which I will definitely be using with Anna). This can be particularly helpful for home schoolers who don't have connections with people who are trained in reading teaching. I am not saying that homeschooler's can't teach kids to read - obviously we can! It does help to have a list with the finer points of learning to read specifically stated, so we can see where there might be small gaps in our children's progress, so we can focus extra teaching where it is really required.

For example, my list breaks down "knowledge of phonemic/graphemic correspondence" to:
~ Single consonants
~ Consonant blends
~ Short and long vowels
~ Vowel digraphs
~ 'Controlled' vowels
~ Dipthongs
~ Variant vowels
~ Variant consonants
Now I knew about all these things, and I have been teaching Anna to decode them all, but it is nice to find them all listed in one place.

There are other skills that we are only beginning to teach, such as:
~ Structural analysis
~ Syllabication
~ Recognition of larger word parts and syllables
as well as things that I have only just begun to quantify, or have not yet thought to consider:
~ Retention of new words learned
~ Interest and attitude
~ [Own choice of] Reading selection appropriateness.

There was also a great list for "general adequacy of reading comprehension":
~Main ideas
~ Facts and details
~ Unaided recall
~ Accuracy of recall
~ Organisation of recall
~ Locating answers
~ Following directions
~ Drawing conclusions
~ Making inferences
~ Making judgements and evaluations
~ Appreciation of author's purpose or style.

HTH!