The First Steps in Reading

January 25, 2014 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged children, Daily Post, education, postaday, pre-school, prompts, reading, teaching, teaching methods

I will teach you how use the most effective, fun lesson to teach a child who has a basic knowledge of letters and their sounds how to read their “first words” . After spending months teaching my two or three-year olds how to recognize the letters of the alphabet, then moving on to teaching them how the letters sounded, we worked on putting the sounds together. I started with just sounds, or maybe small words such as “to”, “go”,“I” ,“no” and such, but found they were soon bored. I came up with away to teach words that they had learned as some of their first spoken words-colors. We all teach our children colors and shapes early on in their quest to expand vocabulary, and eventually read.

I would write the basic colors, such as green, blue, black, yellow, red, orange, purple, pink and white with the color of colored pencil that the word was. Red would be written in red pencil or crayon, blue was written in blue, and so on. I immediately noticed that they paid more attention to the word. When I felt they could recognize the word, I took away the “color” cue and wrote it in plain pencil. With in a very short time, they were reading the words without the color cue.

I did the same thing with familiar object. I might draw a cat or dog and write the word below it. After several sessions, I would take away the drawing and we would work on reading the word. They read them within very little time.

Another methods I used was rhyming words. I would tell them, if you can read “fun”, then you can read words that sound like the word “fun”. I would list “run”, “sun” and ”gun” and have the read them with me. Another set might be “it”, “fit”, “sit”, hit’ and such. You get the idea. I showed them that they could read many words, if they could sound out the primary sound of one word. Again, they caught on very quickly.

As their confidence grew, it encouraged them to put together new sounds, to “guess” what word might come next and to sound out words they didn’t know. If they did not succeed, I would sound the word out with them before they got discouraged. I made each teaching time short, with breaks between reading and math. Science and geography, “maps” were more fun, so I often divided the more difficult subjects with the ones they liked. We did a lot of nature studies, whether it was in the neighborhood, or at a local estuary.

As my older kids moved on, I made sure they were studying geography or science while I worked with reading and math with the little ones. If the younger children saw that the older kids were not working, they did not want to work either. When they were in middle and high school, I would have the older ones learning world nations, their capitols and location while I taught the younger children how to point out each state in the United States and then learn its capitol.

Of course there is much more. Many times, I just did what came into my mind, or saw the children raise a question about. I feel it is very important to begin at an early age and have a consistent routine. If you do not have a consistent routine, I guarantee, you will have to fight for their attention. If it is a part of their day that they expect, they comply with very little objection. You can offer a snack when you finish, if needed.

Teach children is a fun activity for all of you. Robert Half wrote one of my favorite quotes, which says, “When one teaches, two learn.” I love that. It is so true. Try my method, incorporate it into your own and enjoy helping your child off to a great start in school!

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