Helping Your Child Develop Their Reading Skills

Teaching your child to read can be a daunting task for many parents, and for good reason! There are so many steps to achieving the ability to read that precede actually picking up a book and understanding the words within them. As your child spends time in the classroom they will begin to pick up these skills, but continuing with them at home is the fundamental factor in reading success. You can start simple and build your way up! Here are some simple ways you can begin the journey into reading with your child.

The ability to read comes from a solid foundation of pre-reading skills, which you can begin at any stage in your child’s learning. You can start by teaching your child directionality. You can use your finger to track the words along the page from left to right, showing your child that words flow in an expected direction. You and your child can also read aloud as you follow the words with your finger. This encourages them to slow down and helps them associate the words they are seeing with the words they are hearing spoken, creating connections in the brain to strengthen their comprehension.

Another way you can assist your child in learning to read is by teaching them the way the alphabet sounds. Knowing the shape associated with the sounds they make creates an easier path to reading and writing by eliminating the additional confusing aspect of learning the names of letters. Learning letter names will come with time, but you can rest easier knowing they are not as important in the beginning if you would like to work with your child on the essentials first.

 As your child becomes more knowledgeable in their reading comprehension, learning to rhyme will play a big role in helping your child identify familiar word patterns by listening to the sounds that parts of words create. Read rhyming books with them and create your own fun rhyming games. You can ask your child, “what rhymes with goat?” and using their understanding of sounds, they may come up with “coat, boat, float” etc. As your child begins to understand rhyming, they will begin to create their own! This will be an exciting new skill that your child will likely be very proud of, and you will be proud of them too!

Your children want to be just like you, so read often to set an example of what a good reader looks like. Set a time every day to sit and read a book together. Ask your child questions about what you have read together to continue to engage in the story after it’s over. All of these activities are foundational to building your child’s reading and writing skills. Continuing the learning outside of the classroom will create strong readers, and strengthen the bonds you share together. Cherish this special time of learning and growing with your child. You will have a little reader on your hands before you know it!