Teaching Children To Read

The First Steps

There are two ways to teach children to read:

The wrong way: Some people say children should memorize the shapes of words just as the Chinese memorize their ideograms. English has FAR too many words for this approach to even be considered. Furthermore, every English letter and word appears in a truly staggering number of variations. Even if a child memorizes “bright,” it’s not likely that the child would recognize “BRIGHT” or even “bright.”

The right way: Conversely, phonics appears most difficult at the beginning. There seem to be a lot of little details and rules to deal with.  (Ironically, the slower kids seem to be the ones that most need these details and rules; more about this in a moment.) But parents are perhaps more confused than the children. How best to proceed? What to do next? 

The basic idea is to do everything possible to familiarize a child with language and sounds. If the child later attends a school with phonics instruction, it will be very easy. a short lesson each day for four months will teach a child to read. It’s much like learning to play the piano. You take little baby steps, and you practice, and the weeks and months go by and suddenly you’re doing it. So relax. Any good programme with patience, poetry, and the passage of time equals success.

The 7 steps:

1) MEMORIZE ALPHABET

2) ENJOY THE LANGUAGE

3) READ TOGETHER

4) LEARN THE SOUNDS

5) REALIZE THERE ARE TWO ALPHABETS (UPPERCASE AND LOWERCASE)

6) SOUND OUT SYLLABLES, THEN WORDS

7) HAVE FUN

Many of the smarter or more verbal children can learn to read on their own, almost spontaneously. When a child like this goes to a sight-word school, they seem to be learning with sight-words, but in fact, they seem to pass through the sight-words, grasp phonics, and learn to read despite the sight-words.

Laying the foundation for reading should start well before your child enters school. If a child can develop basic reading skills and a love for books before they begin school, there is less of a chance that they will fall behind and become resistant learners.

Teaching your child how to read can seem like a very hard task, where do you begin? Story time, of course! Approximately 1/3 of material in the English Language uses 25 simple words - the longest of which is 4 letters long. In fact, most English material use about 100 words. If your child learns these, they are well on their way to being able to read by themselves.

Adapted and adopted from: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/446528_teaching-children-to-read-the-first-steps#ixzz1t8PGVLev, Written by Shivashankar.V. Jirli.