“Does this method work? How did your kids do? When did they learn to read? When did you introduce sentences/phrases/books?” Everyone who is teaching their own kids is burning to hear some anwers to those questions. Thanks to Laurie, the amazing mother who is homeschooling 10 kids, and a moderator in TeachYourBabyToRead yahoo group, for sharing this!!!

I showed lots of single words. Then added couplets. Then replaced the couplets with three and four word sentences. At that point in my life I had a newborn in the house. So I don’t think I showed her more than 20 sentences before we took a break. I never really got back into showing her any cards. But what I did do was when I was on the computer and my reader would come up to me I would type what she was saying to me. (I type fast.) And then I would type my response to her in a large font keeping my answers in short sentences. I would also tell little stories to her on the computer by typing them. And from there she just took off. I never used the cards to play reading games with her. I never taught the little words like “a” or “an” or “the.” She just picked those up in context. I made less than ten homemade books although I did try to purchase Doman-compatible books. That’s just what worked with my little reader. Some
kids love books.

Regarding neat handwriting, I don’t think that matters to kids as long as they start out with your writing. Plus they are very good at figuring out different fonts.

I hope that helps some.