Discover How To Teach Your Kid To Read In The Most Fun And Effective Way

By Annabelle Holman


As children become familiar with letters and their sounds, the next step is putting them together, in other words, learning to read. There are many things a parent can do from their child's earliest years on to help him or her master this important skill, and also to instill a love of books in the child. These pointers explain how to teach your kid to read in a way that matches his or her stage of development.

A love of books can be instilled from infancy if parents make a point of reading often to their children. Colorful board books with interesting pictures and possibly elements that involve touch, smell, or sound as well, are an excellent choice. Asking children open-ended questions about the story, although they will not respond at this age, helps to stimulate critical thinking.

As the child becomes a toddler, it's important to make sure that books are among his or her playthings. Sturdy, washable books that the child can easily look through on their own are recommended. Having a home book collection, or visiting the library every week teaches kids that books are something good to have around.

Parents can help introduce words to their children by simply pointing them out on the pages when reading aloud. This raises the child's awareness of the fact that words exist and are needed to make a story. Just seeing the patterns of lines and making the connection between them and what they are hearing can establish a good starting point from which parents can next introduce the alphabet.

Starting with the lower case letters first is recommended, since these are typically seen more often in words than the capital letters. As the child begins to be able to identify each letter by name, it's time to start teaching the sounds that are associated with that letter, the best way to do this is to always give some examples of words that start with it. Pointing to actual objects or illustrations which represent these words is most effective.

Using rhymes for teaching letter recognition and phonetic awareness can also help children learn. Children start to pick out the sound patterns and letter combinations that make them. Parents should work on implicit phonics with the child first, that being, learning to recognize a word by its first and last letters, size, and sound, and then progress to explicit phonics, or splitting words into sounds, once the child demonstrates competency in sound/letter matching.

One of the first steps to learning to read is called decoding, which involves the child sounding out each letter in a word and blending them together. Rhyming can be useful in this respect as well. Vocabularies are built as the child matches pictures to words. This must be done before moving on to word comprehension.

Comprehension refers to an understanding of the events described in a story. When children have a reasonable grasp on word use and meaning, this is the next aspect of reading to approach. An easy way to develop reading comprehension skills is to simply ask the child to describe what happened in the story, and ask questions about the actions and feelings of the characters.




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