Teaching Your Child To Read

Many of you may think it is not important for you to teach your child to read; That such a feat should be left to teachers in a kindergarten. It is a crying shame if you think this way because there is so much a parent can do to help a child learn to read. You do not need a degree in childhood education but it doesn’t hurt to learn a little about how to teach.

Some of the questions most parents would ask are:

What method should I use?”
Should I flash cards and teach word recognition?
And what about phonics? Everyone is talking about phonics.

Let me just share my experiences with my two children and hope it will be helpful to you.

My eldest girl K started learning how to read when I enrolled her at kindergarten the year she turned 4. Her school had their own set of books with repetitive words and phrases. With each book there was a list of words to learn. They would progress to the next book only when they had mastered the list of words for that book. She started off slowly but eventually became better and faster at learning new words. I was impressed and it dawned on me that she was really very ripe in learning how to read. It was me who was hesitant and unprepared. Well, I picked up my slack and vowed never to underestimate her abilities again.

After a year of kindy, I pulled her out due to financial constraints. Thus my homeschooling journey started. We did a lot of worksheets to build her phonics skill. She breezed through these worksheets like lightning.

Now the story on my second son D. He will be turning 4 this year. Unlike his sister who started out with word recognition, we started on phonics first.

First step: letter/sound association. My focus was on the sounds of the alphabets and not on the names of the alphabet. In fact, I didn’t even bother with the names of the alphabet. Heck, until today he still can’t get the alphabet song right but that is irrelevant to his reading. I’ve written a post about Learning Letter Sounds before.
Second step: Recognizing beginning sounds.
Third step: Recognizing ending sounds.
Fourth: Blending sounds. So for example, the word cat is made out of three different sounds /c/, /a/, /t/. I would say the sounds separately and slowly and he would have to guess, what word I’m trying to say. I noticed with my children the ability to blend sounds only started when they reached 3 1/2 – 4 years old. Also worked on segmenting sounds. Meaning to break apart the word into the individual sounds.

Apart from phonics, I also do some word recognition with D. Read my posts on Dolch Words.

So far to date, he can read a little. For example, he can read the first few pages of the Dr. Seuss book “Go, Dog. Go! (Beginner Books(R))“.

Observation:
1. Combining both phonics and word recognition help in learning to read.
2. Maybe start off with word recognition first to develop their ability to memorize. Later when they learn phonics, these memory skills will help speed up the learning. K started to learn first through word recognition before phonics. Now, she is able to learn a new word through phonics and then later remember it without having to decode it again. I started D with phonics first. I notice that D’s ability to remember needs some polishing. He decodes the new word. And when we come back to the same word, he has to decode it again. Maybe he is still young and needs more memory practice.
3. It is about 3 1/2 – 4 years old before a child can develop the ability to segment words and blend sounds.
4. It helps when they can write. They are so many fun phonic worksheets to do. So teach reading and writing at the same time.
5. READ, READ, READ to your children. Do it when they are still babies. This is a BIG help when they begin their formal reading lessons.