I had a very innovative Mom. She was the very first mother to use the flash card concept to help me to learn to read. Because of that I not only learned to read, I was an excellent speller in school.

She didn't sit me at a table and flash the words to me. She would write the words down on a big sentence strip, cut it to fit the word and then tape them all over my bedroom wall. It was the last thing I saw before the lights went off at night and the first thing I saw in the morning.

My vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds. I went from one reader in school to the next. I could read through the books before my reading group did, which perturbed the nuns a bit...lol

I was read to as well, but was reading to myself before I was in second grade. How do you plan to teach your kids to read?

Seeker

I learned to read before I started kindergarden. I loved books when I was a kid, and my parents read to me, and teenage cousins read to me, and I just picked it up pretty easily. I could also write cursive by the time they started teaching us to print in school. They insisted I print the letters, but I felt like they were holding me back. I will encourage my children to read and write as soon as they're old enough, and it will bother me a lot if their schools try to discourage them.

I remember being drilled every morning in school on the sounds of the alphabet, consonant blends, vowels. We sounded like a farm yard. Sounding things out words did help me to be a better reader, but I still cringe when I think back to those days....lol

DCMerkle

As soon as he is able to talk, we are going to start playing with letters. I would love for him to read as young as possible.

We always read our children nighttime stories. We hope in a few years that they can read them back to us.

We read all of the time. We read everything, magazines, books, phone books. She couldn't get her hands off of them.

I loved to read and be read to, but I hated to have to read out loud in class. I wasn't shy, I just hated that part. I would read as fast as I could so I could sit down. My teacher would make me start over and read it again slowly.

I think I will work on it with Peter. He is into books right now; can read some. I ask him to read it out loud to me because I like the books that he reads. Little does he know....lol

MuseMom

When are 8 year old was learning to read we would just read to him a lot, teach him the different sounds of words and how they go together, and help him get through parts of books when he had trouble.