Home Schooling Tips for Teaching your Child to Read
While teaching your child to read is something that should not be taken lightly, adding a little bit of fun into the activity can really make things go a lot smoother. It is important that your child learns how to read efficiently.
When Should We Start Teaching the Kids to Read?
For most children, the time is ripe for them to be introduced to reading when they can clearly distinguish shapes from one another. Although they may not know the names of the letters of our alphabet or what role those letters have in our lives and they haven’t yet developed the concept of a “word,” this is the best time to begin slowly introducing them to the world of words. To begin to teach your children how to read and to widen their vocabulary, here is some advice for doing so.
Reading Aloud Time
One thing that can be very helpful is to simply read to them as frequently as possible. Try to go beyond reading only bedtime stories by reading aloud selected commercial messages that appear on your TV screen, by reading aloud grocery store ads, by reading emails that you have written to them, and reading to them from favorite books of yours. This really helps because, as with most things, the more often that they are read to, the more they become used to it. By listening to you read to them regularly, they can also begin to build word associations and begin to understand that there is a connection between the content that you are reading and the sounds of the words that you are speaking.
Visual Stimuli
A fun, but effective, method of teaching your child to develop pre-reading skills is to use blocks or cards. Some children will later show themselves to be visual learners, and this method will work splendidly for them. To begin with, just start with blocks, PostIts, or flash cards showing alphabetic letters and getting them to read the one letter at a time until they can do so (almost) without error. After displaying the items containing only letters, advance to a combination of letters, such as the blends “ph,” “ch,” “wh,” “th,” and “sh.”
Once the child has become proficient here and has started on a more formal or structured reading program, consider this novel way to add a learning to read element to your every day environment: Label everything in your house (or as many objects as you can without wrecking havoc with your décor). This means to take a blank PostIt or flash card and write on it the name of an object in your house, such as “stove,” “desk,” “door,” or “chair.” Start by labeling a few objects that the child encounters on a regular basis, then gradually adding a few more each day. If the appearance of your house begins to suffer unbearably, take away an old card every time that you add a new one. Then, perhaps on a weekly basis, cycle through all of the used (previously displayed) cards with the child to ensure that he or she can still recognize the object that the card “goes with.” Because modern reading programs strongly de-emphasize rote memorization, this technique is best saved until the child’s structured reading program is well under way.
You should go into detail on everything that you read with your child. It is okay that you talk at an elementary level for a little bit with your child (baby talk) but you should be watchful that you don’t overdo it lest the child end up with a much weaker vocabulary than her or his peers. Using detailed phrasings and going into depth of what you are reading (explaining everything) can really help assist the child in grasping the concept underlying the words. If your child asks what you are doing while you are looking at grocery store flyers in the newspaper, don’t just say “Looking for good deals” or “Looking at flyers” but actually go into detail and say something like “We’re going to go grocery shopping later so I thought I would look at the deals in the flyers that came with the newspaper so I can save money by picking the right grocery store.” This should help the child get a greater understanding of what you are really doing. Even though the details may apparently escape the child, the highly plastic child’s brain will take in that message, process a part of it, and store in memory a bit of knowledge from that moment.
Have a few good conversations with your child every day. Speak to them at a level that they can understand and carefully listen to them. Try to re-interpret their basic or naïve understanding of the matter being discussed so that their knowledge of their surrounding environment grows. Not only will this help them later by building a greater vocabulary, it will help strengthen the bond between you and your child. Unfortunately, too many adults don’t speak with their children as often as they should or could.
Learning to speak and listen better is part of being able to learn how to read better as well. So you should make sure that you incorporate every aspect into their daily routine. You should listen to what your children have to say, their feelings, and let them express whatever is on their mind.
There are significant benefits in teaching your child to have both a very strong vocabulary and a strong ability to read text perfectly so the task shouldn’t be taken lightly. Make it fun, but make sure that it gets done. Even though you are home schooling them, because in most cases learning to read begins at a early age, the child need not need to know that the “game” that you are playing with him or her is actually an informal lesson that you are teaching.
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Article by Michael Levy