Reading ability is an important skill to work on with your child. It not only allows them to progress at school, but it improves their communication and helps them to become more inquisitive about the world. Reading with them can certainly help as they pick up new words, familiarise the spellings and learn how to sound them by themselves.
When teaching your child to read, you’ll find that it’s a lot more complex and that there are a number of different stages before you can get to the point where you can actually expect them to read. As it’s a new concept, they’ll need you to break everything down using easy to understand methods and processes that you wouldn’t even know that you go through when reading. To help you, we have teamed up with a nursery school in Hampshire to create a few top tips for teaching your child to read.
Phonetics
The first stage of reading is learning phonetics. They are the individual sounds that your child will need to know in order to read. Unlike the alphabet that we know, you will need to refer to letters by their sounds so that they are able to use their problem-solving skills later on to work out what words are. It will also help to avoid confusion as the names that we give letters are very different to their sounds. For example, C (Cee) creates the sound “cuh”.
Blending
Once your child’s confident, they can begin blending. This is a stage that can take time and that’s okay. It’s important that you are patient with your child so that they don’t feel pressured and understand how to do it for themselves. Blending is essentially the step that children take to merge the different sounds that they have learned together. They sound them out until they are able to identify the words being made. You can help with this by speeding up the sounds so that they become a little more obvious.
A Reading Routine
Children respond well to routine. Reading regularly can help them to move in the right direction as they are able to benefit from lots of practice. Just by hearing you read, they can become familiar with words and be able to spot them more easily when blending. Make a habit of switching roles and find books of actual interest as they will feel more excited and engaged.