How I Learn to Read

It was a big process in order for me to start reading, but I think that the way I learned how to read was by learning the Alphabet at first; because in order to start reading I had to be able to recognize the letters I was trying to read. After I had mastered the alphabet I started practicing with high frequency words. These words were words that we were seeing in our school books, homework, reading, and lectures. These words were placed in small sentence and short stories that the teacher gave us to take home and we had to focus on the word or letter with the high frequency. At first, we did this for a week without a test or the teacher evaluating us, because they were words that we saw everyday in our books. In addition, to what we were seeing went in levels and themes and those themes or levels were more difficulty as we went on. Then, the teacher started counting the words we read in 5 minutes in order to see our progress. This was every Friday, because he had to read short stories related to the theme of the high frequency learning process given by the instructor. We were also given homework that consisted in reading at home for ten minutes every day and that was also check on Friday. While we were doing this we were also blending sounds practicing our pronunciation and having new vocabulary.
Afterward we learned the short vowels sounds and silent vowels in words that were in our textbooks or in our story books that we took home. The story books that we took home focused on certain vowels sounds. This meant that if we were studying a particular short vowel sound in our reading material; our material would just focus about that particular sound. These short stories were focused on one vowel sound at a time. At first it was very easy, but as we progressed the level of difficulty went up as well. Subsequently when we were learning the silence vowel we did everything in school, because the teacher could explain better and could emphasize where the silence vowel was; this process of learning was the same as the short vowels with the difference that we did everything in class. The assessment process was continuous and if the teacher saw that a particular activity or an exercise was not working; the instructor would change it for something that could work depending on the individual needs of each student.
I was very fortunate that I learned to read this way, because I feel it is a good process of learning. I am currently using it where I am currently given classes and it has once again proven to be very useful. By using this method you can make changes as you go; that is if for some reason you as a teacher or instructor feel that something is not going according to your plan or to the needs of the students. The only problem that I see is that the parents have to be involved in the learning process, and in today’s society parents do not have the time to work with their children.