Teach my child to read because the ability to read is vital for success. It helps to build up self-confidence in your child, to ensure they are successful in school, and motivate them in everything they do.
Being able to teach my child to read from an earlier age will certainly enable them to solve the curiosity around them. The child will understand signs and posters, allowing them to acquire knowledge from reading. They would able to gather information themselves and learn more about the world.
Reading Is Different From Speaking
You will notice that young children like to pretend to read when they hold up a book and flip through the pages as though they enjoyed it. Even though they may not able to speak, it does not stop them from learning how to read.
Reading is very different from speaking, and it does not happen at the same time for young children. There is a steady progression in the child’s ability over time.
The best time to time to teach my child to read is when they start to speak, usually around two to two-and-a-half years of age. Basic reading skills can then be developed even before they enter preschool. Read my blog on how the sleep pattern of a child could affect their reading habits.
A young child has a natural curiosity about what is happening around them. They are intrigued by the printed texts they see, and with a little help from their parents, they soon recognised the letters and their sounds.
Placing age-appropriate books for children to access around the house, will keep them motivated for them to pick them up to read. As parents, you’re the most important first step in your child’s wonderful journey of reading.
Read Bedtime Stories To Your Child
Create a supportive environment that makes your child’s reading fun. Read them aloud often during the day and before bedtime. Make it a routine before bedtime, so that they are motivated to go to sleep after giving them a treat of bedtime stories. Before long, they will ask for them when the time is up before they sleep. Soon they will develop their own interest in books and stories, and they can read them on their own.
As a parent, I can help teach my child to read by making reading into a family activity, filled with fun, playing word games, treasure words hunt and putting challenges to who can read better. A child will learn faster under this stress-free environment which helps them to build up a rich vocabulary, language patterns, and a love of reading and books. 365 Bedtime Stories and Rhymes (Hardcover) Shop at Walmart
Below are some tips to help you teach your child to read.
Engaged With Your Child To Read
Talk to them about anything and everything that interests them even before they can speak. They may understand you but they’re unable to speak yet. Ask your child lots of questions even though they might not understand you. Tell them stories, play rhyme games, and sing nursery songs to them.
Daily Reading Routine
Developed a bond with your child through reading. Set aside a routine each day to read to your child especially before they go to sleep. With a routine, the child would anticipate it is a fun time to learn to read new things and nothing is forced through.
That way, they develop an interest in books and reading faster and at the same time more parent-child time together for a healthy bonding relationship. Lamaze Activity Books: Forest: Touch & Feel (Board Book) Shop at Walmart
Teaching Them Reading Comprehension
Besides teaching your child to read make sure they understand what they have just read. Make an effort to question them and wait for their response.
For example, you read to your child:
“Jack and Jill went up the hill…”
You pause briefly and ask your child:
“So where did Jack and Jill go?” Or alternatively, “Who went up the hill?”
A young child may not answer your questions right away initially, but as a parent, you can prob them and they will eventually catch on and turn on their thinking cap whenever they are read to. This a very important step for your child to develop comprehension for without comprehension reading has no meaning. Of course, don’t push through the questions to a very young child every time you read, or they will develop a phobia of reading that requires answering, and soon they lose interest and they quickly get bored. Do it at random times, test it on your child to see if they are inquisitive enough, and do not overdo it.
Use Different Voices When Reading
Use different voices, and tones to enact drama and excitement when reading to your young child, in order to pip their interest. Monotonous reading from the text cannot keep them on the edge for long, they need to picture the drama unfolding before them.
Read slowly to your child, and point to the words and pictures that you are reading to ensure your child makes a connection between the word you are reading are in fact the word that came from the text.
The reading activities should be a fun and enjoyable activity and never feel like a lesson or a chore for them. There are a whole lot of children’s books available. Choose what your child is interested in and if they can’t decide you would choose from a wide variety of rhymes, stories and books.
Teach My Child To Read By Phonics
The mastery to teach my child to read lies in the development of their phonics and phonemic awareness. The first step toward successful reading is my child needs to develop and cultivate a knowledge of the letters, and what sounds the letters represent.
Then they learn how the connection between sounds, is created by combining these letters where words are formed. Essentially, mastery of phonics and phonemic awareness, enable your child to become an independent reader because the child can figure out how a word is formed by sound and written. The child will eventually develop the ability to pronounce new words with confidence and improve spelling and clear articulation.
When it comes to teaching your children to read, it must include three basic principles:
Your Child’s Interest Come First
Whether you are reading for the child, be it a word, sentence, or story, must always be appealing, interactive, bold and sweet to their liking.
Be Creative In Your Reading
Add some fun and innovation of ideas when reading to your child so that they can remember it long after the reading is over, Never force a child to read and do not reprimand them for lack of interest and concentration. If they are listless and tired, never force them, instead go for another day when they are fully attentive. That is why, set up a fixed reading routine where your child is most likely they feel comfortable and responsive, for example when they are preparing for bedtime.
Mastery Of The Phonemes
Teach your child how to combine or blend various letter sounds together to form words. This is a logical progression for a child who is beginning to read. Teach them phonics and phonemic awareness, so that they can learn the letters together with its sound.
This way, it helps them in their spelling accuracy, decoding new words and pronouncing them.
Eventually, they know how to combine the different elements of phonics to produce new words. Gradually, the child may discover new words and it will come as an automatic reflex.
Teaching a young child is not an easy task unless you have passion and patience. Their young mind is restless unless you are able to keep them occupied and interested. Their attention span is short and can be easily diverted from the slightest disturbances.
Teaching phonics to children is just like teaching anything to them and you shouldn’t take too long for the obvious reason just mentioned. It should be short and sweet and make it simple for them to understand what have you taught them.
Repeat them if necessary. Remembered they have a short memory span and their young fleeting mind don’t necessarily retain what had just been taught. Just don’t be too ambitious to teach everything in a single sitting, it is best to spread out into several fragmented sessions throughout the day in order to contain their interests.
Read By Ear Training
Start by ear training because hearing the sound of the individual units would help them to know that these individual units can form to make up a word. Soon, with lots of practice and an understanding of the concepts, your child will be able to mimic you and learn to make a sound to match the letters and eventually combine them all to form a word.
In order to learn to blend simply take words from your every day speaking to your child and include oral blending sounds into your sentences, and sound out words slowly and distinctly. For example, if you wanted to ask your child to drink his milk, you could say: “Joe, d-r-i-n-k your m-ilk.” The words drink and milk is sounded out slowly and distinctly. The level of sound separation can be set by you to increase or lower the difficulty. Thus, if Joe has a tough time figuring out that d-r-i-n-k means to drink, you can lower the difficulty by blending the word as dr-ink instead.
Blending Sound Games
Alternatively, you could simply pick different words and play blending sounds games with your child. You simply say the sounds of the word slowly and ask the child to try to guess what you are saying.
This concept of individual sounds forming words may take some time for your child to grasp. Some children will pick it up quickly, while other children may take longer, but one thing that’s certain is that if you keep it up, your child will catch on. Below are some sample words which you can use to play blending sounds activities with your child.
J-u-m-p J-ump
R-u-n R-un
S-i-t S-it
S-t-a-n-d St-and
M-i-l-k M-ilk
S-t-o-p St-op
The first word is more segmented than the second word and will be more difficult to sound out. Please note that hyphens are used to indicate the letter sounds instead of slashes.
ie: J-u-m-p /J/ /u/ /m/ /p/
This is done to make things easier to read; however, when you read it, you should not read the names of the letters, but instead, say the sounds of the letters.
Even though your child would have grasped the concepts of phonics and phonemic awareness, you would continue to remind them in their daily readings, if not, laziness would prevent them to progress further. Read to Your Baby Every Day : 30 classic nursery rhymes to read aloud Shop at Walmart
Once they have mastered the basics move on to words of increasing difficulty. Keep in mind, not all children can readily blend the sounds to hear the words, so you have to be patient with them. Sometimes, it may take weeks or months for them to get the basics right. Don’t expect instant results, you are dealing with small kids. Take a day at a time, don’t rush to get results. Just perseverance and consistency is the key to success here.
Teach My Child To Read By Developing Phonemic Awareness and Learning Reading
Chinese, unlike English, is taught by word memorization, whereby the child is to look at the Chinese characters as a whole configuration.
Today, many parents are aware of the advantages of acquiring phonics and phonemic awareness skill in helping a child to read and write the English Language rightfully. They do not depend on schools to teach their child English the phonics and phonemic way, and hence, responsible parents must the proactive steps.
According to the National Reading Panel, phonemic awareness greatly has a profound improvement of your child’s word reading and comprehension and it helps your child in their spelling.
Researchers have found that phonemic awareness has a direct correlation with the child’s ability to read correctly as they get older, and it helps to build a strong foundation for children to understand the English Language.
Would You Prefer English To Be Taught in A Systematic Way?
English is normally taught by decoding the words whole and word memorization plays a key role. They stress the flow and meaning of the text, where “sounding out” of words are not used. Which do you prefer for your young child, memorize hundreds or even thousands of words based on memorizations or shapes, or learn a systematic, tested, way of reading?
Teach phonemic awareness skills to require knowing how to break down words into each separate sounds or phonemes, and then to join back the parts to form, or sound out the words.
You might be born during the baby boomers’ generation, where you do not have the benefits of learning phonemic awareness back then. English is taught by learning to read by memorizing and recognizing shapes.
Would You Believe A Child As Young As Two Can Read?
Today, we can acquire this skill in the comfort of our homes and you can teach your child English the phonics and phonemic awareness way. Your child needs only to memorize the letters and the sounds they represent. Using this method, even children as young as two years of age can learn to read unaided successfully.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that phonics is clearly a superior method of teaching children how to read. In the USA, over 30 million adults (14%) are considered functionally illiterate and are unable to perform simple everyday literacy activities. This, however, should not be surprising since over one-third of all children cannot even achieve basic reading competency by the time they are in grade four. This is a finding from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Are these children failing at literacy because they are dumb? I hardly think so, but perhaps it is a result of the poor reading instructions they receive.
It is without doubt, for it has been proven, that learning phonemic awareness skills produces spelling and reading abilities more than the whole language learning methods. Even the National Reading Panel has made a clear statement about this.
Probably as an English teacher, you might claim you teach phonics, but the truth is you may not be knowledgeable of the concepts of the English Language and would perform badly on the concepts relating to morphemes and phonemes. You do not know how to address the basic building blocks of the English language and reading.
Would You Rather Leave To The Educating System?
Some would think that a child would be able to acquire the skill of phonics naturally once having learned to read using the whole language way. Not really, children who have reading difficulties may find it an uphill task.
When a child is taught from the beginning using a whole-word approach, not only does it inculcates a habit of looking at the word by their whole configurations, but it also deters and prevents them see the phonetic structure of words. Those who have mastered the skills can develop automatically the decoding of the letters and words.
If you leave your child to be taught reading by the education system, it may end up as statistics of one of the 38% of grade four students who have not developed even basic reading achievement. Ultimately, the choice is for the parents to choose which path they want their child to follow. Choose the phonemic awareness skills early or even before starting kindergarten, and your child will be on their way to reading and spelling success in school.
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How to Teach My Child To Read By Phonemic Awareness While Reading Bedtime Stories
Helping teach my child to read by acquiring the necessary phonemic awareness early in life is one of the rewards of having successful reading and writing skills even before they start schooling.
The best predictor of a child’s success in reading once they begin school is phonemic awareness. There is an interesting fact that studies have found that phonemic awareness shows far better than IQ at predicting the spelling and reading capabilities of children.
Far fewer people know what is phonemic awareness is than most people know about phonics.
In short, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with phonemes. For example, /d/, /o/, and /g/, are the individual sounds of the word “dog”. Please note, the letters enclosed in the slashes denote the sound of the letter and not the name of the letter. Phonemes are the smallest units of individual sounds that form a word.
You’re not born, regrettably, with an ability with phonemic awareness, Which is only gained through constant and repeated exposure to reading, speaking and listening. My teaching my child to read would incorporate playing simple word segmentation or oral blending games to help him to develop phonemic awareness.
How To Incorporate Reading Bedtime Stories With Phonemic Awareness
I am sure you have already a routine to read to your child during bedtime by now. Once nicely tucked in, and nowhere to go, perhaps it is the golden opportunity where there is no detraction, to hammer phonemic awareness to them.
So, you would begin to mix in word segmenting and oral blending in your bedtime stories. You don’t take up much effort, since your child already knows it’s going to be bedtime stories anyway, except that you just made it fun to learn. So, here’s how to go about it.
Let’s say that you’re reading a nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
Oral Blending
Instead of reading each word straight through the rhyme, you can randomly mix in oral blending on various words in the rhyme. Please note: instead of using slashes “/” to denote phonemes, we’ll simply use hyphens to make it easier to read. So, let’s assume that your child is very young, perhaps 2, 3, or 4 years old, and you want to start helping them develop some phonemic awareness. You can read Jack and Jill like so:
J-ack and J-ill went up the h-ill
To fetch a p-ail of water.
J-ack fell down and broke his crown
And J-ill came tumbling after.
As you can see, when you read the rhyme, you simply make an effort to separate several of the first letter sounds from the words, such as /J/ from “ack”, and /J/ from “ill”. As your child begins to grasp the concept of individual sounds making up words, you can slowly increase the difficulty by breaking down each word further. For example:
Jack
J-ack
J-a-ck
If you repeat a long time, soon your child will develop a sense that each word is made up of individual sounds with word segmentation and oral blending. Reading bedtime stories is a great place to start teaching phonemic awareness to your child as they are unaware that they are being taught, unlike classroom-style of teaching.
Teach My Child To Read Through Phonemic Awareness
When your child possessed phonemic awareness, it means he has the specific ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes or individual sounds in spoken words. The smallest units of spoken words are known as phonemes. They combined to form syllables and words. For example, the word ‘cat’ has three phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/
Teach my child to read involves phonemic awareness, and will play a crucial in developing a child to read and spell. It is advantageous to teach phonemic awareness to them as early as possible, however, Its believe that a child that can speak would be able to progress faster.
Children as young as two years old can learn to read by developing phonemic awareness, and they can learn to read fluently. Want to watch them read? Amazing! Seeing is believing Click to see a video of a 2-year-old (2yr11months) reading.
Common Reading Phonemic Awareness Skills
Below are several of the most common phonemic awareness skills that are often practised with students and young children:
- Phonemic identity – being able to recognize common sounds in different words such as /p/ is the common sound for “pat”, “pick”, and “play”.
- Phonemic isolation – being able to recognize the individual sounds of words such as /c/ is the beginning sound of “cat” and /t/ is the ending sound of “cat”.
- Phoneme substitution – being able to change one word to another by substituting one phoneme. For example, changing the /t/ in “cat” to /p/ now makes “cap”.
- Word Segmenting – the parent says the word “lap”, and the child says the individual sounds: /l/, /a/, and /p/.
- Oral blending – the parent says the individual sounds such as /r/, /e/, and /d/, and the child forms the word from the sounds to say “red”.
Studies have shown that the best predictor of reading success in a young child is phonemic awareness. They will progress to high reading and spelling achievements, but if the child has not acquired this phonemic awareness they will experience a setback in life. They will lag behind their peers, while they experience difficulties in mastering good reading and spelling habits. Needless to say, parents play an important role in their child’s development.
Oral Blending And Segmenting Of Words
You will be glad if your child could eventually able to oral blend and segment words. That will help them to read and spell. Oral blending helps them to develop reading skills wherein they know how the printed letters can be turned into sounds which combine to form words. In addition, word segmentation helps the breakdown of words into their individual sounds and can help them to spell unfamiliar words.
Teach my child to read from an early age so that they can develop and master phonemic awareness skills. With that, it will open up their discovery journey to a whole new world in print and reading.
Through printed materials, they can immerse in an exciting whole new dimension of fun and silliness. They are able to read a vast variety of books and magazines, that they can understand and enjoy, through phonemic substitutions.
Click here to learn how to easily and quickly teach your child to read.
“A Child Who Reads Will Be An Adult Who THINKS.”
Disclaimer: Nothing on this article is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. The contents of this article are for informational purposes only.
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