Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons: Revised and Updated Second Edition

Thanks to this book, my son is the at the top of his class when it comes to reading. He blew the teacher away at his reading assessment. She said that once he blew through a late-2nd-grade book, and only slightly struggled through a 3rd grade book she simply stopped the test and assigned him to the advanced reading for 1st grade. I am one proud mommy! But please don't think I am boasting about my kid. He' smart, but he's not a prodigy. I am raving about this book!!! It's absolutely incredible. For those who think it's tedious or too technical, that may be. But even though many lessons, especially the early ones, are super easy, and the steps feel like overkill, it's about HOW the brain processes and builds on information. You are building a foundation for how the brain processes reading, and it happens without you even noticing. I'm not just amazed with what my son can read, but HOW he reads. He knows how to work out a new word and he almost always gets it right. This book hasn't just taught him to read, but how to think about words. It's something I never thought about, and I am so grateful. These are skills that will carry on throughout his educational career and help him not just succeed, but excel. He enjoys reading because he knows how to do it and doesn't rely on words he has memorized. I know I'm not explaining this well. Perhaps someone can comment and help elaborate. TL;DR Your kid will learn to LOVE reading because the mystery is solved. Get this book. Power through it. You won't regret it. I recommend starting as soon as your kid turns 4. UPDATE: I just had a parent teacher conference with my son's First Grade teacher, and she was telling us how well he's doing not just with reading, but sounding out words, putting word parts together, and reading comprehension. I know that she and my son's Kindergarten teacher taught him a lot, but I also KNOW that he got the solid foundation for those skills from this book. I want to jump in and tell every teacher about it! But sadly they never seem to care much. I think they think I'm over-exaggerating and believe that they are the ones that taught my son to read so well. Well my 4 1/2 year old is now going through it and he's already reading at an end-of-Kindergarten level (and we're on lesson 32). I'm also starting with my 3 1/2 year old and she's sounding things out on her own after only 6 lessons. These are three kids with very different personalities and very different learning styles. I strongly believe that this book can work for anyone. I do change up some of the wording a bit to suit each kid's different style, but that comes easily now that I know the book so well. I hope that this review helps others to make the choice to buy and USE this book. :) UPDATE #2: I just want to add one more little tidbit. My middle child is left handed and he is showing a strong tendency to write in mirror writing (backwards lettering and from right to left). This book has been helpful in teaching him to write correctly. When he writes on his own accord I don't correct him as I have no problem with him learning mirror writing as well, but when it comes to "school time" he has to do it the conventional way, which I tell him he needs to learn for Kindergarten. He would probably get this from any reading course, but I like how this book has the child follow the sounds/words with their finger and trace them too before writing. They really do cover everything and I can see how this book would be helpful for any child having difficulty, no matter how unique it may be. :) With the way it is laid out you are able to emphasize what you need to customize lessons if needed. UPDATE #3 As if my review wasn't already too long! But my kids are now in 1st, 2nd and 4th grade and I just have to say that HOW this book teaches your child to read truly sticks with them. They are still all excellent readers for their grade level. Now that my oldest is in 4th (he's the first kid I wrote about at the beginning of this review) the other kids are starting to catch up. He's reading at an end-of-fourth-grade reading level. My favorite aspect of this book is how they treat letters as blending sounds from the very beginning as greatly helped. In school they learn first the sounds, then they learn to blend. By the time they get to blending the kid thinks they have it all figured out and then they have to learn all over again! Blending should always be a part of letter learning. In this book, they are not "letters," they are always "sounds". Such a small differences that is invaluable! To this day whenever my kids are stuck we go back to the sounds and they can figure it out. Even when they start talking about the letters I say, "No, what is the SOUND?" It always helps the word "click". In this way they can sound out almost any word aside from all the lovely rule-breaking words we have in our language!

This book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, has been absolutely amazing. It’s super easy to read, well-structured, and very easy to teach, even if you don’t have any teaching experience. The lessons are clear, short, and laid out in a way that makes it simple to follow step by step. My child stayed engaged, and I could see real progress quickly. The instructions tell you exactly what to say and do, which takes all the guesswork out of teaching reading at home. It truly builds confidence for both the parent and the child. The price was very reasonable for the value you get, especially compared to tutoring or other programs. This is a practical, effective tool that delivers real results. If you’re looking for an easy-to-follow, affordable, and proven reading program, this book is a fantastic choice. I’m very happy with this purchase and would definitely recommend it to other parents.

Short version of review: this method is powerful and it works. That makes it a sorely-needed, crucial tool these days, so I'm surprised this book isn't a lot more famous than it is. It should be: with parents willing to put in the time, this book could help a lot of kids bridge the gap many fall in to, trying to learn to read in the public school system. This is a better way in some regards as kids clearly benefit from the sustained adult interaction this book's method requires. My suggestion: make it a regular daily event, lasting just for the attention span of your child, and the results will amaze you. At first I was put off by the "100 Easy Lessons" title - why not Ten Easy Lessons? Or maybe even "Five Medium-Hard Lessons" if they get the job done? But no, even in our short-cut era you'll want to accept no substitutes: this book, written in the 1980's by a team of professional educators and by now refined and revised to a smooth, glossy polish, is based on the university-researched and tested "Distar" reading program (whatever that means - read about it in the book) which in practical terms gives you a complete professional training resource to teach your kid to read. As far as I can tell, the "Distar" system starts the kids out with a complete letter-based sound and phonics system so they can learn to 'decode' even new words from their constituent letters. I have been astonished again and again at my daughter's skill in sounding out and decoding words she's never seen before (she just turned five and is about to enter kindergarten), surprising herself and her happy dad when she realizes she's done it and exclaims the new word in gleeful triumph! Here is the big pitfall the book avoids: *you won't confuse your child.* Reading is a very complex skill to learn or teach, and parents tend to rush things, bumping their kids off a conceptual cliff, though with good intentions. Here all parental instructions printed in red type and the book literally tells you what to say. Thoroughly preparing the parent, the book's concise but crucial introduction has excellent practical instructions to the parent and, most importantly, tables that show you exactly how make all the phonics sounds correctly. Also included are tables showing how to teach your kid how to actually write letters (writing exercises are in each lesson), helping them learn to form letters easily and correctly (this is important too - kids are very creative at forming letters in bizarre ways and pick up bad habits quickly). So the bottom line here is that you don't have to take the time to become an effective teacher yourself (a huge task) - the book does it for you, laying out a fail-safe, carefully planned and graded path of instruction, introducing new sounds, words, and difficulties with obvious thought and care. This means your child accelerates smoothly, and you won't push her/him off that cliff by suddenly tossing in something that completely baffles the child. This is a big problem even with very smart kids - they rarely convey their puzzlement if they really don't understand something, while most likely you will keep going, not noticing the child has stopped, disconnected from the continuity of what they're learning. Putting reading skills together the first time means the whole task has to form a steadily-accumulating, coherent whole in their minds. When that process is working, kids learn very quickly and make big leaps on their own. Typology in this book is phonetically helpful also, as the little 'stories' presented are printed in a slightly modified alphabet which adds some basic pronunciation marks to help kids over 'silent' letters, complex sounds (th, ch, sh) and other little pitfalls. Also, short oddly-pronounced words (to, for, was) are carefully introduced as special cases. In doing this, the texts of the book's quirky and slightly amusing little stories can move quickly towards advanced reading skills, through their dozens of carefully-graded steps. The obvious problem with the phonics-based approach is that phonics are really a crutch: pretty soon you want your kid to stop sounding out words letter-by-letter and gain the ability to read whole words and groups of words at a time. The book has copious instructions for doing this, teaching kids to see and read the 'fast' way by the halfway mark, but I feel that extra repetition of lessons or sections of them is useful in getting the kid to literally 'switch gears' as they start to recognize groups of words at high speed. Again, if you approach it systematically, this will work well. I can't imagine a better or more thorough tool for accomplishing what this book promises to do. In the course of about six weeks this summer my daughter has easily mastered its first half and her pace accelerates every day. I'm a grateful dad - this is just what I was looking for. An easy call: five stars! (PS - an excellent preliminary resource in immersing your child in the basic phonetic sounds is the set of five Leap Frog DVD's, particularly the Talking Letter Factory, Talking Word Factory, and so on (one does math, but it's good too). These are nicely animated with music, and kids tend to get them completely absorbed into their brains in a big hurry, making the opening stages of this book's learn-to-read project much, much quicker and easier, with letters immediately understood as phonetic 'sounds' and not the names of the letters - a distinction I had to clarify for myself).

This book starts painfully slowly, but my advice is "hold on." At first, I couldn't stand the agonizingly plodding pace. And it wasn't just impatient me. My three year old didn't see the point of saying the list of words as slowly. But we gave it a chance anyway, after all the good Amazon reviews and marketing hype on the book itself. By a quarter of the way through, we began to look forward to reading time. One small addition I made to the scripted course was to invite in stuffed animal guest teachers (see suggestion 1 below). It worked like a charm. I love the way the parent's part is scripted. The script turns anyone who can read into a patient, supportive master teacher! I love the way all sorts of short activities make up each lesson - very balanced. Best of all is the way this book's lessons touch all the bases. They connect letter sounds with words with stories with writing and finally, with reading comprehension, the point of the whole exercise. I really appreciate the short stories and the picture from the story with discussion questions. Now that I've talked to some teachers, this balanced, comprehensive approach is a perfect way to start a child reading. It doesn't lack any aspect that they will use later, or emphasize one to the exclusion of the others. I didn't expect the writing, but I am very happy that it's in there. I bought the book for my three year old, but I am putting my 5 year old through it too, because it is so complete and methodical. When I first saw the phonetic alphabet, I thought it was a little strange. But my child has no trouble recognizing the joined "sh" symbol as an "s" and an "h." And the "sh" is a single sound in his mind, as are "s" and "h." The notation caused us no problem at all, and I only mention it because another reviewer found it problematic. We did not. Likewise, I wasn't disturbed by short e not being mentioned sooner. Who cares? The order presented was gradual, and as logical as any other.(Although it led to a lot of stories about ants.) I would also offer a few suggestions: 1. If your child loves his or her stuffed animals (or Power Rangers, etc.), then you can use them to be "guest teachers." When I started with this book, I hadn't yet come up with this diversionary tactic, and sometimes working through a lesson was harder than it needed to be. With a beanie baby teaching, my three year old is far more interested in the lessons. My boy picks which animals will help each night, and then he listens intently to them. They help sound out words, rhyme, and watch him write. They are much more interesting than old Daddy, as they are allowed to have excessive personality! When it is time to find certain words in the story, my son doesn't like to just point to the requested word. He prefers to race the beanie-baby guest teacher to the words. (The beanie baby invariably loses.) When it is time to write letters, the beanie baby counts them in Spanish. And so on. 2. Check out some of the "We Both Read" books to supplement toward the end of this book. The "We Both Read" series has a complicated left page for the adult, and a simple right page for the child. You take turns reading, and continue the "reading together" experience beyond the 100 easy lessons. So after a slow and frustrating start, which in retrospect was absolutely necessary, we both look forward to our daily reading time. We brought in the beanie babies to inject the missing element of fun. I know Matthew will have a solid foundation in all the parts of written communication, and Matthew likes the fact that his favorite stuffed animals are teaching him to read. Five stars. Awaiting "Human Relationships in 100 Easy Lessons."

This book is amazing! I'm using it for the second time with my second son at 4.5 yrs old, and he's picking this up faster than I thought he would. My older son is in 1st grade and reads at a 3rd grade level. My only complaint is the quality of the printed books themselves could be better. My first book (bound) fell apart as we got 3/4 of the way through it the first time. I bought the spiral bound for my second son, and the pages are already ripping out as we turn them, and we're only to lesson 12. It won't deter me from using the book, but it's still frustrating.

I started going through this program with our daughter when she was 2 2/3 years old. She is more than a month away from 3 and we are now at lesson 50. What is the standard at that level? Here are 2 lines from lesson 49: "a man gave an old coat to an old goat". My daughter is sight reading that (not having to sound out the words), but most of the time will confuse "coat" with "goat" and will possibly say "give" instead of "gave". That will explain the 5 stars I'm giving the book, so if you need to make a purchasing decision go ahead and order the book already. The rest of this review will detail a bit more about our experiences and advice I have for other people purchasing this book. I think you'll find it valuable. IMO, the key to understanding early learning is to realize that pretty much any complex task can be reduced to a set of simple tasks and rules for determining the order of those tasks. The way you teach anyone, be it a toddler or a university student - is reducing what you want your student to accomplish to a set of tasks that your student can accomplish, assessing their ability at each task, and teaching the skills involved with those tasks. After you have successfully taught each sub-task in a task, teach the task (the integration of the sub-tasks) as a skill. That is why the author is a genius for putting this book together - he has identified each small skill involved in reading, and lays out a practical method to teach those skills in the order necessary. At the price that this book sells for, it is a steal. Buy it already. It will do infinitely more for your child's ability to read than spending 50 times the equivalent money on 50 glittery 10 page cardboard books with 3rd grade reading level that will do next to nothing to teach your child how to read. As an example, I started with the Bob Books . Which are good of course, but you soon learn that when your child can sound out the words, "saying it fast" as the next stage is a separate skill that needs to be taught and your child doesn't know what you mean. So you have to teach that skill. And there are a host of separate skills that are not obvious to anyone who has not tried to teach a toddler how to read. This book covers each of those skills! Looking at the other comments, I realize that there are very few other parents who have tried to go through this with a child my daughter's age. It did not happen in a vacuum. We went through starfall (google it) from since before she was two, and then taught her how to use the computer sufficient to navigate through starfall by herself when she was maybe 2 1/3 or so. She would spend an hour a day or so by herself, of her own volition, navigating through the letters at first and then everything else on the site. In this way she was laying down the connections between neurons in the skills of understanding of the letters and what their sounds were, and in recognizing patterns. As stated, we had already started with the Bob books a week prior to TYCTR. And prior to that we had practised each of the sounds of the alphabet, so that she was ready to sound out words by the time the book arrived. To be honest, we could have started on this book well before we did. However, the time preceding was by no means wasted. I would have chosen to do things differently though, especially the actual sounds of the words. So, buy this book before your child is ready for it is good advice - it will teach you other skills that are useful for your child, and prevent her having to unlearn your previous amateurish teaching. What ended up happening is that we ended up coasting through the early lessons until we hit a wall. And while the vernacular is to "hit a wall", what she really hit was not a wall but a ramp that was a bit too steep for her - the natural rate of her ability to learn, as determined by the state her brain is growing at, coupled with its prior training. We hit this ramp at about lesson 43 or so. She was protesting it, and not enjoying the process any more. (I would well recommend buying the author's other book, Give Your Child A Superior Mind as mentioned on the front cover - as it will explain the learning adaptations that your child is going through that you interpret as "mistakes". Note to the author/publisher - get thas book reprinted, please! So be patient.) I also suspect that the "wall of text" the stories at the end became a bit intimidating for her, especially at the end of a lesson. Note that it's actually no more words than a typical Bob book, which she will munch through happily. That's not a knock on the book at all. The author can't control the pace at which your child can learn. So, what did we do? We went back 10 lessons and started again from there. And rather than be constrained by the arbitrary "lesson" format of the book, we did half a lesson at a time. Sometimes finishing it in a day. My daughter was enjoying it again! Teaching your child to read in this way is as much an education for the parent as it is for the child. Here is my advice: -You will get the book and look at the 30! page intro and the orthography, and think "Whoa!". But have faith, the author knows what he's talking about. Boy, does he know what he's talking about. -Get feedback from your child (pay attention to their ability to concentrate etc.) You will have far better progress at the start of the day than at the end of the day, when their brains are tired. This should ideally be a morning activity. Also, don't be too hard. If they are struggling to concentrate, often they are coming down with a cold or flu. Be gentle. -Use bribery and blackmail. ;) The holy trinity of a sticker on a calendar, a lolly (jube) and a movie will move mountains. I don't have a problem with this - consider how addictive television is. That's what you have to compete with. 100 years ago when all kids had to play with was cardboard boxes, maybe little of this bribery would have been necessary. -Do it every day. It becomes a nice ritual for you, a great way to bond with your child. It also teaches your child that a little bit of effort applied regularly can achieve great things. -Dispense with the writing until they (want to) learn to hold a pen properly. When they are ready, go back through this book with the writing parts (I think we are about to start that now.) Reading is an easier skill to learn than writing. Which leads me to... -The maximum mental ability at a given age in a given toddler is genetically governed. You can't exceed this limit, but you can reach a level you otherwise wouldn't - by providing a nurturing environment. Note also that there will be genetically defined times that a mental ability "comes online". The corollary to that is that if your child is not ready for something, don't force it! Look at what your child IS ready for, and teach that instead. Gauge, gauge, gauge. -From that perspective, attempt to do things the author's way, but don't force things and don't feel that you need to say word for word what the author recommends. Achieving success with a child at the youngest level requires a knack for seeing what the child CAN accomplish, and teaching that. The younger your child is (developmentally speaking), the more you will have to ad-lib, in order to maintain the child's attention. Going too fast is an error, and going too slowly is also an error. And sometimes your child will be stubborn and want to do it her way, and look at what she is doing. Maybe she knows better than you do? For example, my daughter has decided from lesson 45 or so that she wants to sight read everything she can, including the story at the end. I let her. The book says to sound everything out first, but now we just sound out the difficult words. -Another thing I notice is that I think she is starting to sound out the difficult words in her head rather than verbally. Rather than enforce that she sound everything out, I'm letting her try it her way. -A great exercise, and one my child loves, is "find the words". The book starts this some time early in the piece, and stops well before lesson 50. However, we do this every single time because my daughter loves this so much, and we have inadvertently found that it is probably the most effective way to teach sight reading. We find every single word, not just in the paragraphs at the end but through the word lists. Now we break the paragraphs at the end (ironically, using a Bob book as the block) into two sections so that finding the words is manageable. (Note that we do this AFTER we have read the words in question). -I think that you need to get excited about some aspect of it. During a time when my daughter's patience waned, I had to use a trick from someone else here, and have her stuffed animal read the story. It worked. But "find the words" (said in an excited, salesman-like tone) is the game that she likes to keep coming back to. Whatever your child likes in the lesson, remember it, tell her she's good at it, that she loves to do it, praise her, tell her that you're proud of her. She will identify that and you can use it to provide motivation. -We read each word "Lesson XX", e.g. "Lesson 45". It's a great way to teach counting in the double digits, she has picked up the pattern already, though the exception of not saying "forty zero" for "40" confounds her sense of logic. But remember that you should be teaching basic maths concepts (e.g. counting) at the same stage you are teaching the reading. Numeracy is as important as literacy. -Don't be surprised if your child improves her spoken sentence formation as a result of seeing grammatically correct sentences laid out for her. It will improve more than just her reading. That's probably enough for now. I hope this helps someone. And to those reviewers who say that this book is boring - well, maybe it is. But it is effective, and it can be spiced up. And it is probably the quickest way you can get your child to read books that are sufficiently complex that they ARE interesting. The end goal here is to be able to get your child to the stage where they are good enough at reading to allow an addiction to reading to develop, and at that stage you can just select interesting books for them to read. If they are reading for a few hours a day because they love to read, think how much faster they are going to learn (many things, not just reading) than reading for twenty minutes a day on your lap.

tldr: Book was great. Would recommend it to any parent who wants to teach a young kid how to read. Used the book with my 4/5 year old to teach them to read, and after 6 months of hardship they can now read at a somewhat basic level. It's actually really impressive how we went from not knowing any letter sounds at all to reading 100+ word stories in the course of this one book. Lessons ramped up to an average around 30 min each after the first 20 introductory lessons. Pros: + The book fulfills its promise of teaching a child to read in 100 lessons. Which is awesome. + It's easy enough for any adult to use and doesn't require building any sort of lesson plan. You just sit down with the kid and follow along, correcting any mistakes they make along the way. + Tons of tips and tricks for the adult to use when teaching the material. + Several hundred unique words are introduced by the end of the book, with an emphasis on phonics + Supplemental flash cards are available on the web for all the letter sounds and even words. Cons: - Learning curve is all over the place. You _will_ have to repeat lessons. Sometimes several times, or even go backwards. - Blending sounds was painfully hard for my kid. I'm not sure if that's because the book was a poor resource or I'm just bad at teaching, but this was the primary area where I had to leave the book behind and get help from other sources. - There is nothing "easy" about this book for the kid learning. There's a reason it took us 6 months to get through the 100 lessons, and it's not because we forgot about it at some point. After around the lesson 30 mark things became a total slog. They cried, we cried, It was pretty miserable at times. By the end we resorted to outright bribery: "If you do this lesson I'll give you ice cream. Do you want ice cream? How about TV? A new toy? All three? Ok great you've got yourself a deal!". Did I feel like an awful parent doing this? Yes. But hey now my kid can read so I like to think the results speak for themselves. - The book uses a goofy font for the first 2/3 but then switches to a regular one with maybe 2 lessons of transition. My kid handled it fine but found it very confusing at the time. - Constantly reminds you about how English as a language is a complete and total mess. The book highlights these inconsistencies and effectively gives up on them, teaching them as "funny words" that just need to be memorized.

The book starts out excellent. The child learns to read and the lessons are easy. The book starts, though, by writing extra symbols on letters to specify the sound. At less 73, the book transitions from this method to regular symbols with times new Roman font. This is extremely difficult for the child. Rather than incorporating phonics and teaching the child to figure out why letters make different sounds in different words (e.g., a vowel followed by a letter followed by an e makes the long vowel sound), the book relies on having the child remember what different words sound like. That is, this book has many more words act as sight words — words that a child must remember by sight — than is necessary. At about lesson 78, I gave up on the instructions of the book and taught my daughter phonics instead. That went a lot better for her.