When I was a young mother, a wise more experienced friend, Lorraine Rife, whom we met in Okinawa, told me how she read the Book of Mormon with her small children. She sat down with her children every day. She put the youngest child on her lap and read one word then she had the child repeat it. Then she said another word and the child repeated it. Then, she put the next child on her lap and did the same thing. The child repeated the same number of verses as the child’s age, so if the child were two, then he/she would repeat two verses, the four-year-old would repeat four verses and so on. Even a one-year old could mimic the words. I’m sure even our infant children benefitted from this. She followed along under each word with her finger as she read, while the child on her lap repeated the word as the other children listened while awaiting their turn.
So, that’s what I began to do. It worked fabulously.
I bought a giant soft-cover large-print Book of Mormon. Each child used this same book. I sat with each child daily. I wrote the date and the name of the child at the end of each reading session, so we knew who started where the next day. We read nearly every day in this fashion. Sometimes it was difficult to get the children to sit still, but after doing it consistently, they got used to it. It was worth every minute we spent sitting and laboriously reading one word at a time. It took discipline and patience.
When my kids could read by themselves, they begin to read their own verses with the family, and they begin to read the Book of Moron from start to finish by themselves.
We began doing this in Okinawa when Carl was three and continued through all six children, to Ben. Allen eventually joined us in our daily ritual, which began our family scripture time. This practice has made all the difference in our family. It took our family four years to finish the Book of Mormon the first time and we have read it together many times since. Reading the scriptures with our young children has made a huge difference in their lives and ours. Everyone behaved better and was more content and happy. And, it gave me peace of mind. I knew I was doing my part as a mother to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with our children.
We taught our kids to read using the Book of Mormon back in the early 80s.
When I began to home educate our kids when we lived in Michigan, I learned that children, in the old days, learned to read by reading the Bible. I decided that I would teach our children to read by using the Book of Mormon. I knew it would be much more beneficial for them than the modern-day readers like Dick and Jane or Sam and Ann or whatever they use now-a-days. I used Sam Bloomenfeld’s Alphaphoics hand in hand with the Book of Mormon. I underlined often-repeated words that they could recognize and rhyming words on the same page we were reading for their phonics lesson, circled prefixes and suffixes, circled homonyms, consonant blends and dipthongs. The Book of Mormon and my phonics book supplied everything I needed to teach the kids to read.
So, that’s how we taught our children to read using the Book of Mormon. This inspired Spirit-filled book has made all the difference. I’m sure reading the Book of Mormon with our kids and them reading it again on their own increased their intelligence and reading comprehension. They are excellent readers and they are awesome individual who love Book of Mormon, the Lord Jesus Christ and His gospel.
Recent Comments