Update on teaching my daughter to read: Why we love Elephant and Piggie, by Mo Willems

We have a Prep in the house this year and for the first time, I’m having to sit down and teach someone how to read. Somehow the oldest child just picked it up without much input from me (or at least it felt like that). The second child is completely different. She is very talented in lots of things, and she has learned how to do things like roller skating and cartwheeling by sheer stubborn determined practice. However, reading is something that you can’t teach yourself without some input from others. Putting herself out there to be taught and to possibly fail in front of others is this child’s absolute death zone.

We started with the simplest of readers which came home from school. The ones that have virtually the same sentence on every page, this was great for her confidence because she has a good enough memory. My concern was that she wasn’t actually learning to read.

We persisted with the sight words, making sure they were visible in the two places she sits to do ‘work’. Then at times when I would read to her, I would encourage her to look for the sight words in the text.

We tried some other books that used only words that could be sounded out. They were okay, but there wasn’t much of a story to these so she lost interest.

She is now at the stage where she has about 50 sight words and a bit more confidence. They have covered quite a few sounds at school and she is starting to see her own progress.

So a few weeks ago we tackled ‘Happy Pig Day‘.

I have read it numerous times with the kids before but had never realised how perfect it is for learning to read. Almost every page had one of the first 50 sight words. In fact, some pages only had sight words. Another great thing was that the same words were repeated multiple times throughout the book. But the best thing about this book and the other books in the Elephant and Piggie series is that kids actually love the characters, the storylines and the jokes in the books.

These last few weeks we have had a 5-in-1 book, ‘An Elephant and Piggie Biggie‘ and it is getting a lot of use from all kids, but especially from me and the Prep. She now knows that these books are manageable for her and she doesn’t balk a the idea of attempting them. Progress!