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Comment by selleck | Hacker News Reader

We homeschool and my wife has taught 7 of our 8 kids using: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Highly recommended for parents with kids at the age to start reading.

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That's the most famous product of the Direct Instruction project-- the idea that you could break down subjects into explicit, tiny pieces that students can master effectively, and standardize the most effective curriculum you develop after years of experiments.

It works far better than most educational programs, but teachers tend to hate it because it doesn't give them latitude for creativity and planning their own lessons!

Yes, I taught all 4 of my children using that book and it’s amazing and works and should be the standard everywhere. It was actually recommended to us by our first daycare teacher who used to teach elementary school before retiring. She said that early in her career they were all using this book and never had a problem teaching any of the children how to read ... until the school system was flooded with new theories every year that promised to do it better only to end up worse with every decade she taught. So she went out and told every parent she could to get the this book and do it themselves. Worked like a charm.

Unless I misunderstood the article, this book does use some of the 3-cue method with the stories in the last few chapters that have picture representations. But I get the feeling there's really a delicate balance between using techniques to understand what you're reading vs an ability to just read words.

The idea in the book is you hide the picture, have them read the story then once they have read the story you show them the picture and talk about it.

With the rise in homeschooling due to the pandemic, I'm not surprised this book is currently out of stock on Amazon!

At first I misread your sentence as "With the rise in the homeschooling pandemic, ..." :)

I'm finding that as I get older, I make more mistakes like that when I'm tired.

You may be forgiven for your double-take: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/pandemic-pods-sch...

Thanks for posting.

Leave it to the NYT to fear monger about small groups of children. Hahaha

You think this would be a good book for a non english native kid or is very 'english' specific? I can't find any good books in portuguese about teaching kids to read that doesn't use the 'visual' method (since it is what is used in schools). I wouldn't mind translating the lessons myself to portuguese and present it to him of course, but if 50%+ is english specific (grammar rules, etc) than maybe not a good idea

Perhaps find a classic text. Or look specifically for phonics.

I've also had awesome results with this book! My 5 year old seems to really enjoy the lessons. He's still working on building confidence with regular text (the early lessons in the book use a special orthography), but doing fantastically well for his age.

That’s the book my mom used to teach me how to read. I don’t remember much about it, but it was apparently effective, so it’s nice that it’s stuck around for the past ~20 years.

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