Monday, 4 August 2014

Find Out How To Teach Your Kid To Read And Love Books

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.

When it comes to introducing the concept of sounds and words, the parent can begin by pointing out the words on the pages to the child when reading aloud to him or her. Although it is too soon for children this age to sound out a word they can become familiar with the idea of each word having a unique pattern of lines and particular sounds associated with it. Moving on to the alphabet and learning the individual letters is the next step.

Lower case letters are used more often in words than upper case letters, and are more visible, so it's best to teach the child about them first, and then move on to capitals. Besides learning the name of each letter and how to recognize its unique shape, the child needs to learn the sound it makes. The best way to teach sounds of letters is to point out physical objects or pictures of words that start with the letter.

Rhymes can also be fun tools to help build phonetic awareness and letter recognition. The sound patterns of letter combinations will become apparent, which are necessary in rudimentary word identification. Implicit phonics involves recognizing a word according to its size, sound, and first and last letters. Explicit phonics consists of being able to break a whole word into smaller parts or syllabic sounds, and can be attempted once a child can competently match letters to sounds.

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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