MONTESSORI AT HOME: Learning to Read

hi my name is ashley and i'm a mom of two little girls i have a four-year-old named kylie and i also have a two-year-old named mia now as you probably already know from the title of this video today we're going to be talking all about how your child can learn to read using the montessori approach and this has actually been a very highly requested video for a really long time coming and i am really excited that i finally have enough experience under my own belt and i know enough about this process to finally share it with you guys so we're gonna dive into that today one thing that i want to touch on really briefly is that the one question that i'm often asked the most related to this topic is phrased like this how do i teach my child how to read and the operative word here is teach in the montessori approach it is not really about an adult teaching a child explicitly how to read in the sense that we would normally think of it it is not about memorization and drilling kill sessions and thousands of flash cards it is much more so about helping your child to discover and to explore and to find joy in this ability that they suddenly have now that they can read based on all the prior experiences that we have helped to provide them with the ultimate goal is to help our child discover that they can read on their own terms now there are actually a couple of different approaches in helping your child learn how to read in a montessori environment and you may have heard of some of them the pink green blue series the orton gillingham approach and the muriel dwyer approach which is what we're going to be exploring in this video today now what i'm going to be sharing with you today are basically like the highlights of the muriel dwyer approach but i learned everything that i know about it from this pamphlet that was written by muriel dwyer herself and it goes into a lot of detail on exactly all the different steps of the approach and what order to do them and all the possible questions that could come up along the way it's all in this little pamphlet and it's actually available for purchase on the matrilearning website which i will put a link to in the description box down below it's only 15.95 it's a really short easy to read thing that you could probably do in under an hour if you sat down and put your mind to it and by the way this is not sponsored at all even though i don't exclusively use the mural dwyer approach i kind of sample from a bunch of the different approaches and we've kind of been piecing together our own language curriculum at home i did find this pamphlet specifically to be incredibly helpful especially as a brand new homeschooling mama who has never had experience with helping a child learn how to read before i thought that this was a really good starting point perhaps for somebody who is starting from scratch also and so i thought it was worthwhile to share with you guys but anyway i am ready to go ahead and dive into this with you guys so from one busy parent to another today i'm going to be sharing with you all about the first couple of steps of the muriel dwyer approach what i would consider the early stages of learning to read in the montessori way all right so step number one is to build rich vocabulary this is something that should be happening from the moment of birth in all homes there's no reason to wait on this this is especially true with babies under the age of one they are absorbing all of the sounds of the language that they're hearing in their own home environment and all of these little building blocks are being stored away in their brains they're like little sponges so even if you feel like your baby is not 100 understanding what you're saying trust me it all counts and it is going to make a difference in the long run so the first thing that you can do to make sure that you're providing all of this rich vocabulary is to make sure that you're speaking to your child and singing to your child on a daily basis so you're having direct one-on-one conversations with your baby even with your newborn as if they're going to respond to you and even though they're not going to that's okay you're talking directly to them and you're also singing little songs it doesn't have to be anything fancy and trust me your baby doesn't care about your singing voice just sing with them so that they can hear that rhyme and that cadence and everything that goes into listening to music all of that plays a crucial role in understanding language and when you are speaking to your child make sure that you're using the correct names for everything that you see there is no reason to provide the baby version of a word just because you feel like your child can't understand you don't need to dumb it down for them they need to hear the correct vocabulary terms they need to have as much exposure to it as possible if you expect them to be able to use those words later on remember this is the time that they're absorbing all of it so for example if you happen to go on a walk for your child outside instead of saying oh look do you see the doggy you can say hey do you see that golden retriever across the street and give them the exact name of the breed of the dog and before you know it your child is going to look at you one day and say hey mommy do you see the golden retriever over there and you're gonna be blown away that your two-year-old knows what a golden retriever is and the only way that's gonna happen is if they've had the exposure from you or from some other adult in the home so use the correct names for everything whenever possible and even when your child as they're learning to speak uses their own versions of words for example if they say baba for bottle instead of just parroting back baba to them oh do you want your baba instead when you hear them say the word baba repeat back to them with the correct word when they say mommy baba you say oh do you want your bottle this way they're always hearing the correct pronunciation of the word that they're trying to say and it's not that you're explicitly correcting them and telling them that they're wrong you're not calling attention to it in that way it's just a very matter of fact you responding with the correct word this way they have the exposure to it and over time they just kind of pick up on it and they start using the correct word by themselves something else you should be doing is reciting little poems and nursery rhymes with your child every day ones that eventually they can start filling in the last word of the sentence and then over the course of time they're saying more and more parts of it with you until one day you overhear them in the other room saying it to themselves without you even there and they don't have to be anything fancy again just any any little poem any little nursery rhyme that you happen to know and have memorized like the itsy bitsy spider for example like those kinds of things are going to help your child as they're learning this language that they're working so hard to acquire not to mention poems rhymes music all of this tends to really draw your child's attention in a really interesting way to the minute differences between different words and different sounds and so it's going to better equip them in the long run when it comes time for them to start reading to be able to decipher between the different letter sounds and they'll be able to hear it as they're learning to sound out words much better and finally make sure that you're reading to your child every day this is perhaps the number one most crucial thing that you could be doing to help your child eventually learn how to read on their own because modeling is where it's at if your child sees you reading for pleasure if they are involved in reading with you sitting on your lap looking at children's picture books from as far back as they can recall they're going to naturally have a love for reading they're going to be a little bit more motivated but you can also read anything like nonfiction books the newspaper you can read anything that you want to your child even when they're babies and they don't 100 fully comprehend it yet because it's all about the exposure the more exposure they have the much better off they're going to be all right now all of these things that i just mentioned are things that you should be doing with your child from birth as i said and then up until about the age of two and a half to three of course you'll keep doing it beyond that stage but around the age of two and a half to three is where you can kind of start to move into the next step of this approach and that is with the ever popular sound game or sometimes called the i spy game again this is something that anyone in any home regardless of what kind of school your child will eventually be attending anyone can play this game with their child and they should because it can only help now when you first begin playing the sound game you want to make sure that you focus only on the beginning sounds of words you're eventually going to move on to all of the other sounds in the words but you want to start off with the beginning sounds because those are the easiest for your child to hear and to recognize now for this game you're going to be focusing exclusively on key phonetic sounds so that would be the 25 different beginning sounds of the alphabet letters for example a for apple for banana for cat and so on as well as there are 15 other key phonogram sounds that are actually composed of two different letters for example the o a in oat or the o u in cloud the q u in quilt the s h in shark or the ch in church just to name a few and as the adult you should already be familiar with what all of these phonetic sounds are so i will put a link in the description box down below that you can check out so that you can familiarize yourself with them ahead of time before you start playing the sound game with your child so the very first step in the sound game is to make it incredibly easy for your child to understand the concept of the game and to make sure that they're successful so you're literally only going to have one object it can be anything i'm holding a pen but it could be a ball or a doll or any number of objects around your house but something that has a key phonetic sound at the beginning so in this case we would have a for pen you're gonna make sure that your child has this object in their hands and you're going to say something along the lines of this i spy with my little eye something that begins with this sound and your child has the object in their hand already so they're naturally going to look down and think pen pen and they're going to be successful and very excited about it and so that way you can kind of introduce them to what it is that they're supposed to be thinking about as you're playing this game so that is step one once your child is very good with that which shouldn't take very long if they are actually ready for this game you can then move on to increasing the number of objects that you're asking your child to kind of look at and assess the different sounds that they know so you would maybe move on to two objects and have them choose between two and then maybe add a third and a fourth and a fifth until perhaps you have a little basket of like a dozen different objects sitting on the table or the floor in front of them that they can kind of look at as you're asking them for one particular sound and here is a quick example of what that might look like i spied with my little eye something that begins with a sound oh i don't know kiwi kiwi all right i know i started my little eye you know what that tv is really white it is really ripe we should eat it a wonderful orange okay i spy with my little eye something that begins with the sound pressure brussels sprout starts with the sound but your eventual goal is to be able to pick out any object that you see in the room around you and then ask your child to identify it based on its beginning sound only so for example if you happen to be in the kitchen you might spy a banana on the counter way off to the side and say i spy something that begins with a sound and your child should be able to look all around and then lock eyes on that banana and say oh banana so once your child has become really proficient at doing the sound game with the beginning sounds it is then time to move on to the ending sounds of words which is a slightly harder concept for the child to grasp but there is a really easy way to introduce it so let's say for example the object in question is a box you would say to your child i spy something that begins with a sound and ends with the sound and give your child a chance to kind of fill in the gaps there for a moment as they say box and you'd say yes box begins with and it ends with and once your child understands that concept and they're able to do the ending sounds pretty well then you can move on to the middle sounds and with the same example you would then say to your child now what sound is in the middle and hopefully at that point your child should be able to tell you ah the sound ah is in the middle of the word box so generally speaking when you are playing the sound game with your child you want to make sure that you're starting out simple again try to set them up for success as much as you can so start out with words that only have three sounds in them and i don't mean three letters although many of them also have three letters just three sounds in them okay because that's going to be easier for your child to kind of parse out but once your child becomes really good with being able to identify all of the different sounds in various words that only have three sounds then you can move on to introducing slightly more complicated words and you want to do it again just a little bit at a time so move on to words like butter for example that only have four sounds in them so that's four sounds even though it doesn't have four letters again we're just worried about the number of sounds at this point so again start off with words that just have three sounds but eventually move it up to four and five sounds as your child gets better you want to continually challenge them up until this point you should not have intentionally introduced any letter symbols to your child right now you are only working on letter sounds you need to help them develop that phonemic awareness being able to hear all the different sounds of speech before they are ready to connect that with the much more abstract symbol of what a letter looks like all right so i'm about to move on to the next step of the process but i did want to put out this little disclaimer first it is generally not recommended that you have montessori materials in your home like the very specialized materials that i'm about to share with you as part of this process you really shouldn't have those things in your home unless you are actually homeschooling your child and the reason for that is if your child is attending a montessori preschool they're going to have all of these materials at school and a you don't want to ruin the magic for them you know you want it to be like this special thing that they're doing at school to help maintain that interest but their teachers might also introduce the materials differently than you do and you don't want to confuse your child by accident and on the flip side of that if your child is not going to a montessori school then it could be very likely that you could actually really confuse your child because they're going to be learning how to read in a completely different way and just that could introduce some troubles that you don't even want to bother with so just don't open that can of worms do not have these materials in your homes and do not move on to the other stages of this process unless you are homeschooling all right so with that said the next step of the process then is introducing the sandpaper letters to your child so you're going to be doing this around three years old when your child has become fairly proficient with the sound game as we were just talking about and you'll be introducing the sandpaper letters to your child as a picture of the sounds that they already know it's this magical picture this symbol that enables them to actually see what it is that they're hearing and speaking in everyday life so when you introduce the sandpaper letters to your child you're going to make sure that you introduce them only about two or three maybe four letters at a time and you're going to do it using a three period lesson which i have a video linked to in the description box down below if you are interested in learning more about how to conduct a proper three period lesson with the sandpaper letters and for that first lesson you're only going to be introducing the single letters of the alphabet together but after that for any subsequent sessions that you do with your child you can actually mix up the single letters and the two letter phonograms together it doesn't really actually matter you don't have to do one before the other you can just do them together there's actually been a substantial amount of observation in montessori classrooms to support the idea that children don't actually seem to have any difficulty in being able to distinguish between the two letter phonograms and the single letter ones so you can absolutely do them at the same time if you want to so after you've introduced the key sounds from certain sandpaper letters to your child you can then kind of extend it a little bit and help get them thinking about where they normally hear these sounds by giving them a word you could say i hear the sound ah in the word cat act is in cat can you think of any other words that have the sound a in it and then allow your child to come up with their own little list of other words that they know they might choose rhyming ones like matt and bat and sat or they might go off on a total tangent of their own and say apple it doesn't really matter the idea is just to get them thinking about the words that they know that have that particular sound in it and to be able to identify it accurately so you're going to spend quite some time working with the sandpaper letters and making sure that your child has a really solid understanding of the association between the letter symbol and the letter sound itself and you can kind of test this by asking your child to retrieve certain sounds for you from across the room so you might set out a couple of the letters and say can you bring me the sound and your child should be able to go over grab the letter s and bring it back to you with no problem and once your child can do that with all of the sandpaper letters with no problems that is your cue right there that your child is ready to move on to working with the movable alphabet which is the next step in the process so in case you're new to this the montessori approach emphasizes writing before reading which is counter-intuitive to the way most of us have traditionally seen it done usually we think reading comes first and then you write later but it is flipped in the montessori approach for a very good reason first the child is not actually expected to write with paper and pencil until much later they are writing with the letters of the movable alphabet which you'll see in just a moment but the primary reasoning behind this is because reading is actually more difficult than writing if you think about it it makes sense with reading you are starting from the unknown you have no idea what this word on the page is until you sit down and decipher each of the different letters and put them together whereas with writing you are starting from the known you're starting from a thought or a word that you have in mind and then you're just figuring out a way to express it so writing comes naturally for children actually before reading does and that is why it is done that way in the montessori approach so the child moves on to working with the movable alphabet first to accomplish writing when you first introduce the movable alphabet to your child it can be a little overwhelming because it is quite a large box with lots of different letters in it so you want to give your child an opportunity to practice being able to know where the positions of all the different letters are this will actually help reduce their frustration when they first begin learning how to use it so you can do this by actually pulling out a whole bunch of letters and having them work to put them back into the proper places in the box a couple of times once your child has some familiarity with where the different letters are and they feel like they're ready to move on you can then have your child think of individual words that are just things they've come up with on their own it could be any word that they want and you want them to write it on the floor on the map that they're working on using the letters from the movable alphabet and they're again going to be doing this phonetically so the spelling is not going to be correct right now it's just based on the sounds that they're hearing and that is totally okay because spelling is something that is worked on a little bit later when they begin writing on paper once your child is able to spell out words with relative ease then you can encourage them to start spelling out little words and phrases and even whole small sentences so during this time that your child is working with the movable alphabet there will come a day that your child spontaneously of their own volition begins the process of reading and it's likely going to happen in some way where perhaps your child sees a label or a sign or a word in a book just they see something that they're trying to figure out what this one word says they're trying to decipher it on their own and if you're lucky you might actually be able to catch them in this process of sitting there and trying to figure it out you'll see them sounding out the letters and they'll be like and then you can kind of try to be helpful and say what do those letters say and then they're still sounding them out and you say yes let's say them a little quicker cat cat cat and your child will suddenly just explode into this discovery that they've just read a word all by themselves and that is something to be seriously proud of so once your child starts doing this this is the time that you can kind of move on to some new activities where they can get more practice with this sound blending that they need to be able to master in order to actually start fluently reading and there are two activities that you can introduce to help with this process it doesn't matter which one you do first or you can do them at the same time but there are two different ones that your child is going to love the first one is called object boxes so for this activity you want to put together a little basket or a box of about a dozen little objects whose names are all spelled phonetically so for example cat pig dog van bed top jug drum the list honestly could go on but they need to be spelled in a way that your child can actually sound them out and since you're likely going to be doing this activity over the long term with your child every so often you want to change out what the objects are that are in the basket just to help maintain your child's interest this way there's always something new in there it's a new challenge something that just you know kind of draws them in and makes them want to engage with the material so for this activity you're going to need your set of objects a pencil and a couple of slips of paper and you'll start off by having your child take each object one at a time and say the name of the object out loud and the reason for this is that you just want to make sure that they actually know what the name of the object is before you begin and if there is one that they don't know then just set it off to the side and make a mental note for yourself later to make sure that you teach them what that word is so that they know for future attempts but once your child has actually named all the objects then you're going to play a special game with them and you want to do it in this really inviting kind of exciting way to keep them motivated so you're going to say to your child something like i am thinking of one of these objects and i'm gonna give you a special clue a little hint that is gonna help you figure out which one it is that i'm thinking of okay i'm gonna write it down for you and you're gonna make sure that you actually write it down in front of them so they can see you and then you're going to give the little slip of paper to your child and say okay here's your clue can you figure out which one i'm thinking of and then allow your child as much time as they need to sit there and blend the sounds together until they can read the word that you've put down on the paper and if they do need a little bit of help in the beginning that's okay but eventually they'll be able to start doing this on their own until eventually it clicks and they discover that they've read the word that you just wrote on the paper and then they can very triumphantly pick up the correct object and hand it to you so you're going to repeat this process until your child has named all of the objects that are in the set and after you're done if you want you can leave the little slips of paper that you wrote in the basket for your child to practice with independently or you can create little cards even if you want them to last a little bit longer and once your child is really proficient with being able to play this game with the single letter phonograms the ones that correspond to just the alphabet letters then you can do the same exact activity except this time the objects that you're going to include in the set all have some of those special two-letter phonograms like the oa in boat and if in the beginning you find that your child is having a little bit of difficulty in identifying the correct object because it is the two-letter phonograms then you can give them a little help a little hint by underlining the two letters that go together when you're writing it down on a slip of paper to help them focus on their memory of what that particular sound is and just as before if you want to leave the little slips of paper with the object so that they can practice independently afterward you can certainly do that and also don't forget to periodically switch out the objects that are in the set and play the game with them anew each time so that they have as much exposure as possible to all of the different phonograms that they might be reading and the second activity that you can introduce to your child either at the same time as the object boxes just as something else that you can do together or you can wait and do it after the object boxes or you can even do it first it doesn't really matter but the other activity is called activity words and it's the same exact concept as the object boxes except instead of writing the names of objects on little slips of paper you're going to be writing action words that are spelled phonetically so it's kind of like charades in a sense except it's been flipped on its head because you already know what the answer is and your child is the one that has to be able to read it to decipher what it says before they can act it out so for example you might take a little slip of paper and write the letters h-o-p for hop and slide it over to your child give them an opportunity to blend the sounds together until they can actually read that you've written hop and then once they figure it out they usually get really excited and they're ready to go off and do whatever the action word was some examples of some action words that you might choose to include are things like clap kiss hop spin jump run sit stomp there are honestly so many of them and i will be sure to put a link in the description box down below to a website that has a couple of more ideas for you and finally just as you did with the object boxes once your child is really good with these action words that only have single phonetic sounds you want to move on to incorporating words that use some of those two-letter phonograms as well and finally the last step that i'm going to be talking about in today's video is called puzzle words and puzzle words are any of those words that don't actually follow any of the phonetic rules that our child has been learning up to this point they're just kind of those weird one-off words that don't really make a whole lot of sense but we just memorize them over time and we just know what they are when we see them and there are a lot of them but just to give you a couple of examples that you kind of have an idea words like i the was and because walk cough i think you get the idea so to introduce these kinds of words to our child because they don't follow any of the rules we have to make sure our children know that and then we have to very explicitly provide opportunities for them to learn what these words are typically through a montessori 3 period lesson and just so you guys can have an idea of what this might look like here is a short clip of some of the highlights of my daughter's very first lesson ever in learning about some of these puzzle words the first one is a can you say a a so for example if we said a cat is sitting next to me a cat is sitting next to me a okay this one is the can you say so this one would be for an example the cat is sitting next to me the and the last one is once once like once upon a time once can you show me a a can you show me once right can you put the on your lap put the back on the mat can you put a on top of your head put a back on the mat can you put once on top of the once on top of the can you hand me once oh thank you can you put the back on the mat you put a on my knee thank you can you put once on my knee let's see now that's a very silly game it's a very silly game okay can you tell me what is this once okay once what is this and what is this a all right so those are all of the initial steps of the mural dwyer approach that cover this kind of early stage of learning how to read from the montessori approach if you are looking for more detail and a very step-by-step specific guide on these steps or if you have an older child who is ready for the next steps then i would highly recommend that you check out the actual pamphlet by muriel dwyer herself which i will link again down below for you guys not sponsored i just find it incredibly practical and helpful i'm using it myself and that is why i'm recommending it to you and if you are interested in learning more about montessori at home or positive disciplined parenting i also offer a couple of e-courses that walk you through it step by step so i'll be sure to leave a link to that as well in the description box down below and just in case you are new to my channel i also wanted to let you know that this video is part of a much larger series on this youtube channel called montessori at home which is aimed at providing practical tips and advice for busy parents like you and i for implementing montessori at home with our children so if that sounds like something that you're interested in watching more of then you might consider subscribing to my channel this way you don't miss a new video because i do upload a new one just like this one every single week thank you so much for watching today and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Hapa Family

Views: 45,284

Keywords: montessori reading lessons, montessori reading method, montessori reading, montessori learn to read, montessori, montessori at home, montessori for babies, montessori baby, montessori toddler, montessori activities, montessori parenting, montessori teaching method, montessori activities for babies, montessori activities for toddlers, montessori playroom, diy montessori

Id: 0NcYcol1p4E

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021