📖 Homeschooling? Teach Kids To Read At Home With This!

Hi there. My name is Drew Badger, and I recently posted on Facebook asking homeschooling parents

what problems they were having, or frustrations they were having, with teaching their kids

how to read. I also asked if parents were interested in testing the app that I'm developing.

I received hundreds of replies and messages. So to say thank you to everyone for their

support and feedback, in this video I'd like to share some tips and explain how to teach

your kids to read at home the easy way. If you're struggling to teach your kids at home,

I understand completely. With the current pandemic, more and more parents are teaching

their kids at home. Even if you have the time to do this, though, it's hard to suddenly

create a whole curriculum for your child if you don't know much about teaching. There's

also a lot of conflicting advice out there. The good news is that this video will simplify

everything for you and you'll get to see exactly how I teach my own kids to read at home. You

might not know it, but many classroom teachers actually homeschool their own kids. I'm from

Chicago, but I live in Japan. And for the past 15 years, I've been helping English learners

all over the world learn to read and speak English fluently. I've helped hundreds of

students in the classroom as well as over 1 million learners with my YouTube channel.

Now, the first thing to understand about teaching reading is that the English language has many

confusing spelling and pronunciation rules. And this is why many teachers argue about

the best way to teach reading and why many children currently in school are struggling

to learn to read. But the truth is that there really are just two groups of words. The first

group has words that you can sound out, like the word cat. We've got three letters, C,

A and T, and we sound them out C-A-T cat. This sounding out is often called decoding

because you're looking at the letters and trying to use rules to understand how they're

spoken. Phonics is the general term for learning the sound rules of words and about 84% of

commonly used words can be decoded using these phonetic rules.

The remaining words break phonetic rules. These are usually called sight words. An example

is the word the. If you were to try to pronounce this using phonetic rules, you would have

something like th-e But we pronounce it the. Understanding this, it seems like it would

be easy enough to teach a child to read. You just teach them the rules of phonics, have

them remember the common sight words and then have them practice reading to build fluency.

But a much bigger piece of the puzzle is missing, causing a lot of struggle and frustration

for many students and parents. To understand this, imagine if you're watching

some kind of mystery movie, you're following all the clues, you're really excited about

it, but then I come in and tell you the solution. Or I tell you who the killer was, or I just

give away the answer to whatever the problem or mystery was. You would probably be pretty

angry about that. And the reason is because you want the pleasure of solving that problem

yourself. Because that's really what learning is. It's giving you the opportunity to figure

something out by yourself, rather than someone just telling you the answer. So the big secret,

the missing piece, you've got the phonics, you've got the sight words, but you're also

allowing children to discover those rules by themselves. This is what's going to make

it a lot more fun and a lot more memorable and actually help them learn to read much,

much faster. So let's take a look at how this happens.

How can we actually let children teach themselves how to read rather than us holding up flashcards

or telling them what every sound is? It's actually very simple to do this, and this

is exactly what my app has made possible. But, the first part is contrast. So let's

look at these five words, bat, bet, bit, bot, but. But so when I'm teaching someone how

to read, I'm actually just letting them compare the different sounds and this contrast lets

them understand what they mean automatically. Obviously you need to review a few times,

but it's much easier than holding up individual phonics cards or something like that. You

want to let them compare the different sounds. And in this case, we're comparing the short

vowels a, e, i, o, and u. Now, the second part of this is that you let

students control this by themselves. So let's take a look at the app and you can see how

this process works. Again, we're going to compare, but we're allowing students to compare

things themselves. Now this is the first part of the app, this is called explore mode and

we're just letting students try testing different sounds. I'll let you compare a few right here.

Cat, cap, can. C-A-N, can. Isn't that cool? And you as a parent don't

need to know anything about what are the rules of phonics, because it's all just laid out

for you, all the steps, right in the app. This is just one level. Now, after you've

gone through and tried comparing a few different sounds, you can test yourself to see what,

you know. Tub, side, bug, bug, bang, hit, hit, hub.

These games test you, but they also develop your fluency because they're developing your

speed, they're showing you the same words again and again. And then you even get to

see them in sentences. Now, what was so great about the responses I got from parents is

that people even with really young children, like three and four, were enjoying the app.

And also students who had learning disabilities like dyslexia were really happy to say that

they enjoyed the app and it was helpful for them.

So the app is actually free to try right now and I was just sharing it with people on Facebook

if they ask for a link. But I'm putting it right here, so everybody, you can either click

on the link in this video or on the link in the description for this video. And you can

start playing it right now for free. Of course, if you want to get the whole thing, all 35

levels and all 2000 plus words and sentences, it's really about the cost of lunch.

Thank you so much again, for all the parents that gave lots of great feedback and especially

all of the children who have started using the app, all the adults as well. But thank

you so much, it's really been a great pleasure building it. And I really look forward to

making further improvements for you. Have a fantastic day, enjoy the app and I'll see

you inside. Bye bye.