Learn the importance of teaching kids to read at an early age. There are several different techniques that are talked about.
One of a child's greatest achievements is learning how to read. Many people feel that this is not possible for toddlers. However, I have been teaching my children to read at the age of two for almost twenty years now.
Whether the young child learns to read with success and pleasure depends on if he/she is ready to begin.
Most of what is involved in making a child ready to read take place before a child reaches kindergarten age. The child will experience the meaning of the stores that are read to them. (I began reading to my children as infants. Many times while I was feeding them I would read.) They will begin experiencing those trips to the airport, the zoo, or even to the grocery store. While the are experiencing the book, your child's vocabulary will begin to grow. Soon these words that they are hearing will be words that they will learn to read.
While you are reading to them, children begin to discover how important reading is. They learn that if you are taking all this time to read to them it must be something that is important for them to learn. If a child is lucky, he/she will be surrounded with a number of good books to read. This is a very important way for parents to promote reading readiness.
When your decide that it is time to actually start teaching your child to read, you must start with a prereading or reading-readiness program. What this program does for the child is to first give attention to the developement of oral language. The child must first learn to distinguish between visual forms that are similar in shape. (Later this will help them to distinguish between similar words.) Children should also be taught to listen carefully for beginning and ending sounds. Being familiar with sounds of the spoken word is the foundation for teaching phonics, which is a method for teaching children to read.
Most children begin the process of reading by learning what we call sight words These are words that are taught as wholes or units. Children learn to recognize these words by sight. Some examples of these types of words are:
Down Jump
Look At
Man Can
Here Get
No child can become an independent reader if he/she depends on someone to tell them what each new work is. They must learn to aquire skills by which they can recognize new words.
One technique that can be used to recognize new words is phonics. Phonics is the association of speech sounds with the letter or letters that indicate these sounds. When they gain the knowledge of consonants and vowel and how the work in words, the reader can then pronounce a large number of unfamiliar words.
The teaching of phonics can present some problems because in the English language a speech sound can gave several different spellings. An example would be the sound indicated by the letter "o" in the word no. It can also be found in the following words:
Through
Oh
Show
Yolk
Sew
In each of these cases the sound is indicated by different letters. Because of this, an alphabet called the Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet has been developed. It originated in England and has 44 characters instead of the 26 letter in the Roman alphabet.
The younger reader can also learn to identify new words by dividing them into their structural units. These units are called prefixes, suffixes, and word roots and endings. This technique is very useful in identifying larger, more difficult words. For example if a child knows the word "pack", he/she should have no trouble reading words like unpack, repack, packing, and package.
What children read and the values they get from them are as important as learning to read is. Signs of a mature reader are when they can pick out quality reading on there own. When you train a child to read at a young age, they will use reading as a way to make adjustment and for gaining clearer insights into the world around them.
Just think of the pleasure that they will get when they start school and they already know how to read. It will take away much of the fear of the unknown, for they will have already read about it.
