Why Is It So Important to Teach Your Young Child To Read?
Teaching your child to read at an early age is one of the best things that you can do as a parent. You will be greatly improving their chances in the future and you will be giving them the wonderful gift of literacy.
If you have ever thought about how to teach a child to read or more importantly how to teach your child to read, then you need to take the next step so that your child can reap the enormous benefits that early reading provides. It is not difficult to learn how to teach kids to read.
It Is Better To Start Teaching Your Kids To Read At An Early Age.
When your young child learns to read they will be inspired to learn more about the world in which they live. Their curiosity will increase and they will develop a desire to learn that will really set them up for the future. All you need to know is how to teach a toddler to read.
Have you ever wondered “when should I teach my child to read?” Well teaching toddlers to read can be done as soon as they have learned to speak. This is a good time to teach kids to read and all you need is to understand is how to teach a kid to read effectively.
Any Child Can Learn To Read After They Are 2 Years Of Age
A lot of parents will believe that a child of 2 years is too young to read. But this is simply not true. Because this is not the norm it does not make it wrong or impossible. If you don’t teach your child to read early then you are depriving them of intellectual development.
Don’t be put off by the fact that young children have a very short attention span. An effective lesson to teach your child to read should only last between 3-5 minutes. Teaching a child to read in this way will produce the best results.
The real secret to getting a young child to read is to hold their attention for a short time and develop their curiosity so that they want more. The materials need to be simple and interesting and give the child a sense of excitement and pleasure.
Early Reading Makes Your Child Smarter
Your child will grow in intelligence if they learn to read at an early age. By learning to read and being read to, 2 and 3 year old children will learn to use more complex sentences and it will improve their memories so they will be able to recall distant events more easily.
Their general knowledge will improve as they gain access to new information. Reading will also enhance their development of powers of reflection. Vocabulary and language development will be stimulated and this correlates highly with levels of intelligence.
Reading Is A Critical Skill For Your Child
When your child is taught to read early they are accelerating their academic success and they will develop a true love of learning which in turn will lead them to achieving better grades in every subject.
The attention span of your child will improve if they are taught to read early. Their powers of concentration will also be improved. A child with a high reading proficiency will be able to comprehend a lot more of what they are reading.
In time your child will become competent at research and will find it easier to single out the important information from reading materials. Early readers are much more likely to become lifelong readers and also lifelong learners.
Early reading will increase the social status of your child and also their self confidence. Young children are socially aware and they can work out who is good at what. If your child can read then they will probably be asked to help children who find the recognition of basic letters difficult.
Why Leaving Your Child’s Reading Development to Their School Is Taking a Chance
A lot of schools teach reading based on the memorization of sight words or at least have a heavy bias towards this kind of teaching. Sight words are high frequency words that appear often in text and usually there are around 100 words that are taught in schools.
One of the main problems with sight words reading is your child will be taught to focus on how a word looks as opposed to being taught how every letter should sound. This works OK when the words don’t follow the rules of phonics, but the child will not be able to read words that they have never seen before.
As the child has not been taught any decoding skills, they could well have trouble pronouncing the word “can” properly and may well guess that the word is “cat” or “car” because these words look very similar.
Sight words learning will limit the vocabulary of your child which means that they will only be able to read the words that they have learned by sight. Worse still is that if your child is taught to read using sight words they can become dyslexic.
The USA has over a million people that are dyslexic. With sight words training your child will be taught to name words rather than read them. The English language is phonetic and should be taught phonetically.
If your child has learned to read using a bias towards sight words then they will be limited to reading the books that have the words in them that they have learned. Your child could just memorize the words in one book and then not be able to read the same words in another book.
Sight words reading has a distinct lack of structure when compared to a phonics based teaching approach. With phonics training your child will learn the sounds of individual letters and then progress to two letter and three letter words.
This natural progression is lacking in sight words learning. It is possible that your child could read five and six letter words from repeating the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet”. Words such as “little” or “tuffet” could be recognized by your child and at first this may seem impressive, but this would soon turn to disappointment when you discover that your kid cannot read the word “dog”.
It is important that your child becomes an analytic learner and these skills will be developed if teaching phonics is adopted. Relying on sight words will not help to build any analytical skills and this could truly hamper your child’s ability to read proficiently.
Why do schools persist with sight words? Well they believe that this training produces early gains in a child’s reading success. Is that true? Well there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it isn’t true. It does not prepare a child well for phonics based learning.
You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher
There is no question that you are the best teacher for your child. You have built a secure bond with your child and they trust you and love you. With this secure bond you will have laid the perfect foundation for your child to learn.
When your child feels secure and loved it is likely that they will be able to learn better especially when this learning is fun and entertaining. Once you know how to teach children to read they will respond well to you.
In the first three years of your child’s life their brains develop at an astounding rate. When your child is three years old their brain will have grown to 80% of an adult size brain. The links in key areas of the brain are also developed at this stage.
A child learns so much from their parents. Your child can talk because you talked to them and they learned how to smile this way too. In fact a small child learns from you each day. If you stress to them that education is important then they will believe that too.
Action speaks louder than words here. If you want to encourage your child to read then you should read often. Your child will follow the examples that you set and most parents set good ones and this makes them the best teachers.
Most parents teach their children how to listen in the early years and this is an excellent foundation for learning to read at home. These listening skills can be developed further by you so that your children will naturally want to learn.
In order for you to be the best teacher that you can for your child you need to prepare for this. Teaching your child properly is going to take time, patience and consistency and there is no way around that. Always remember that your child is very young so that you are never disappointed by what they do.
Reading To Your Kids Is A Good Thing
When you read to your kids you will encourage a higher aptitude for learning and this will make the child’s transition to learning to read a lot easier. There have been a lot of studies that have shown that children whose parents read to them before preschool usually perform well in academic studies.
By reading to your child they will learn language and enunciation skills that are vital for their development. They will be able to understand the basic sounds which form the English language. When you read to your child it should always be a fun and enjoyable experience for them.
During your reading sessions with your kids make sure that they are always involved by asking them questions about the book or story that you are reading to them. This can be taken a step further by creating activities that are directly related to the book.
If you want to know how to teach a child to read effectively then you must read the next section.
Phonics Instruction And Phonemic Awareness Is The Best Learning To Read Combination
If you want to know how to teach your child to read in the quickest and most efficient way then the answer is to use a combination of phonics instruction and to develop your child’s phonemic awareness .
How To Teach Children To Read Using Phonics
You need to know how to teach your kid to read using a phonics system as it is much more effective than whole language methods such as sight words. There are many different types of phonics systems and the best one to use is synthetic phonics.
What synthetic phonics programs do is teach your child to convert the letters that they see into sounds, known as phonemes, and then combine these sounds into words that are recognizable. By providing explicit instructions synthetic phonics uses a sequential order to work with phonemes.
This system has been used effectively to teach children how to read under the age of three. Teaching phonics is a very powerful yet simple system for teaching your child to read by synthesizing words from their component sounds.
All of the phonemes of a word are decoded and then the sounds are combined together to complete the word. A child is first taught the various letter sounds and then they are taught how to combine these sounds together to speak the complete word.
By breaking the reading process down into small basic steps, a child of less than three years can learn to read effectively. The best toddler reading programs will explain how to teach phonics.
Phonemic Awareness
The ability to hear, identify and work with phoneme sound units is called phonemic awareness. It only deals with phonemes and the manipulation of the individual sounds that make up a word. For example /c/, /a/ and /r/ are the sounds that comprise the word “car”.
You can teach your child phonemic awareness from an early age and this will help immensely with your child’s reading and spelling development. If your child can speak then they can learn to read. Even two year olds can develop phonemic awareness to help them to read fluently.
Some of the most important phonemic awareness skills are:
The ability to recognize that different words have common sounds such as the letter /c/ in “cat”, “car” and “can’. This is known as phonemic identity.
Understanding and being able to change one word into another by the substitution of one phoneme so the /t/ in “cat” is changed to an /r/ to make “car”. This is called phoneme substitution.
Word segmenting is a skill that your child develops where they can say the individual sounds of a word. So you could say “cat” and they would say /c/, /a/ and /t/.
When your child is able to recognize individual sounds of a word such as /r/ is the initial sound of the word “red” and /d/ is the ending sound they will have achieved phonemic isolation.
Oral blending is a technique where you use individual sounds and your child will speak the entire word. For example if you say /p/, /i/ and /g/ then the child will form the word “pig”.
Phonemic awareness is so effective that studies have shown that it is the best way to predict reading success in young kids. Those children with high levels of phonemic awareness were found to achieve more when it came to reading skills and spelling.
To accelerate your child’s reading proficiency the combination of phonics and phonemic awareness is required. When these techniques are used your child will be able to pronounce new words, improve their spelling ability, develop clearer articulation and really develop their self confidence.
The combined techniques process starts with teaching your child letters and their sounds. Once they know this they can be taught to combine these sounds to form whole words and this will progress to being able to read sentences.
The key here is the decoding of the words and their pronunciation. Once this is mastered spelling will also fall into place. Over time the phonic elements can be used and combined to form new words and the discovery of new words will be an automatic thing.
How To Teach Your Child To Read In Short Bursts
Teaching using phonics should take no longer than 15 minutes a day and this should be broken down into smaller sessions of 3 to 5 minutes. This is especially true if you are teaching a very young child, if the child is older then you can make the lessons a bit longer.
It is best to start with ear training as this will help your child to fully understand that smaller units of sound make up the entire word, and when these smaller sounds are combined the whole word will be spoken correctly.
It is important that you sound out the words distinctly and slowly when you are teaching your child. So that the child does not realize that they are being taught, use words that you speak everyday and use the oral blending technique.
So for example you could encourage your daughter Amy to read her book by saying “Amy r-e-a-d your b-o-o-k”. You would sound out the words “read” and “book” distinctly and clearly to her. You can make it easier by using different levels of sound separation.
How To Teach A Child To Read With a Proven Reading Program
If you really want your child to succeed with their reading, then it is best to choose from the few proven reading programs for kids that are comprehensive and can help and instruct you with every aspect of your child’s reading development.
The best reading programs for toddlers will provide all of the training and resources that you need to teach your child to read in a systematic and solid manner and they will have a proven track record with many satisfied customer testimonials.
It is assumed that you do not want to pay hundreds of Dollars for a reading program. Also you may be shocked to know that some of these very expensive programs have not been fully proven to work.
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Use [Product Name] As Soon As Your Child Can Read
As soon as your child is able to read you can use the wonderful [Product Name] to teach your child how to be a fluent reader. On the official review web site there is proof of children between 2 and 3 years old reading fluently because their parents have used the program.
If you have young children between the ages of 2 and 7 then the {Product Name] is tailor made for you as it will help you to teach small children and toddlers to read fluently. You will be taught how to teach reading with phonics.
The main aim of the [Product Name] program is to teach your child how to decode the printed text that they read fast and then help your child to develop their phonemic awareness so that they can be fluent in their reading.
This phonemic awareness is crucial for your child to be able to read and then become fluent. Studies have shown that a child with poorly developed phonemic awareness is likely to be a poor reader and experience reading difficulties.
You will not find a more step by step, simple and straightforward reading program than [Product Name]. The development of phonemic awareness and basic reading skills are assisted from the very first lesson with the simple exercises and practice materials.
A Two Stage Program
It is a two stage program and both stages are covered by step by step lessons and instruction books. In Stage 1 of the program you will learn how to teach your child to develop the critical learning to read foundation skills so that they will be able to learn to read and develop fluency.
Stage 2 is a little more advanced and is designed to significantly advance your child’s reading proficiency. It builds upon the successful foundation skills that were developed in Stage 1 of the program.
Stage 1 of the program consists of 28 lessons which provide clear instructions to teach your child and this starts with the reading printed text building blocks. Your child will be introduced to the letters of the alphabet and their associated sounds in a step by step manner.
In the early lessons, simple words are introduced as well as sound combining exercises. As you and your child progress through the program more complex words, rhymes, sentences and stories will be introduced.
Once all of the Stage 1 lessons have been completed your child will have excellent reading skills and you will be amazed at how they have developed so quickly and easily.
The 22 lessons in Stage 2 deal with the more complex areas of reading. A key aim of Stage 2 is to teach your child about digraphs (letter combinations). All of the words, rhymes, sentences and stories used in Stage 2 are more advanced and will significantly increase your child’s reading skills and the fluency of their reading.
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