Kids and Reading

Reading as an activity is fun, and for pre-readers, it is a mode of entertainment, as well as a mode of learning. Cultivating a reading habit from an early age ensures that children are more successful during their school years. Those children who read a lot have a greater chance of getting into colleges and go on to achieve greater success in life. Reading for kids helps in establishing good habits during the early development years of a child. The benefits of reading with a child are many, and the after effects are astonishing.

Kids and reading are an unbeatable combination. Early reading habits increase the future potential of the child. Those children who have been read to on a regular basis or have learned to read early on develop a curiosity toward the various facets of life. They get into the habit of asking questions and don’t stop until they get satisfactory answers. These children are more inquisitive than their peers and are also of a more analytical bent of mind. They do not take things at face value and believe in getting to the root of all subject matters from a very young age.

Reading is an activity which guarantees that your child grows up with a wide and diverse knowledge base. Since it jolts the curious side of human nature, it leads to higher ambitions in everyday life.  Kids and reading activities mean that the child is learning the language better and is building on a better vocabulary. By reading out to your child, you are teaching her/him the art of listening and the means to develop interpersonal bonds.

Reading to kids and encouraging them to read more books helps them develop their speech and string together long sentences without much effort. Reading activities for kids helps children understand the basics of grammar so that they are unlikely to make grammatical mistakes in the written or verbal context. Kids who read a lot learn correct sentence construction and grasp the concepts more easily than their counterparts who don’t read or have not been read to during their early years. Reading to kids helps them hone their imagination and encourages their creative drive as well.

Most children’s books expound the positives of good behavior and habits. It is, therefore a natural conclusion that children who read more or are read to on a regular basis will develop good habits and behavioral patterns. Thanks to their having a better knowledge of everyday life, these kids are likely to be more confident and know how to express themselves better.

Reading out loud to young kids and instilling in them the habit of reading is probably the best thing that any parent or teacher can do to ensure the child’s success in future. A problem with getting kids and reading together is that initially, they may find the process to be too tedious. However, if you can make the process of reading fun and encourage the child by rewarding his/her reading progress, he/she will soon develop a penchant for it.

You have to remember that reading is a life-time skill that can soon become a permanent habit, but more importantly, it is one of those habits that can benefit the child throughout his/her life. So, find innovative ways to instill a love for reading in your child.

>> Click here to discover how you can easily teach your kids to read in just 12 weeks

Online Fun Reading for Kids Storybooks

Online lessons are becoming the source of fun reading for kids. Play-like activities, songs and e-books are made to complement classroom learning in a fun way. The internet provides an atmosphere of fun learning and elicits the children’s enthusiasm to learn using all their senses, as most of the lessons are interactive with audio-visual fun games. Online activities usually come with printed and downloadable workbooks parents can order and get delivered to their homes.

Activities online guide children to make positive and correct responses and they provide exciting, fun reading for kids. As we know, practice makes perfect and your child will learn how to cope with his frustrations practicing again and again until he makes it a success. As the internet page can always be refreshed and accessible almost anywhere, your child can always go back to the lesson, skip it, or go back to the lower level while practicing and honing his skills.

There are fast learners and slow learners

The lessons have levels, and fast learners can always find higher levels to achieve fluency. Colorful pictures and illustrations help the children in associating words with their pictorial representations and make them remember easily. As children develop their reading skills, they will move on from learning to read, to reading for fun when they start to comprehend the materials they are reading.

This is the 21^st century and the modern education system is expected to educate each and every student according to the child’s abilities. How fast a child learns to read depends on many factors such as age, maturity, and their innate abilities to learn. Generally, older and more mature children will learn to read faster compared to younger and less mature kids, so this is an important factor to keep in mind when developing lessons for teaching kids to read.

There are numerous ways to make learning to read fun for kids. Aside from using computers and TV programs, it is highly recommended that the parents take an active role in teaching their kids to read. You can read interesting and fun story books with your child, and read out aloud with dramatic voices. You can use simple treats to encourage your child along in their reading lessons, and you can even reverse the teacher and learner roles where you become the student and have your child pretend to be a teacher to teach you how to read. Of course, you will need to help your child along in their “teaching” you how to read.

Learning to read should begin early on, and parents should not rely too heavily on computer and TV programs to teach their children to read. Studies have found that direct parental involvement where the parents took an active role in teaching their children to read had the greatest benefits for their children.

>> Click here to discover how you can easily teach your child to read while having fun at it

You Should Learn How to Teach Your Kid to Read

If you are a young mother or father with a toddler, you have to know how to teach your small child to read. Beginning reading lessons cannot be deferred and left to future teachers when your children goes to kindergarten and early grade school. It is usually started in infancy with story books and nursery rhymes.

As your child grow older, you should help them develop an interest in books and reading. At this stage you become more adept and have the basic knowledge of how to teach your kid to read, and your toddler has exhibited preferences with regards to reading materials and you probably know by this time his or her capacity for learning.

It is a common misconception that when a child is finding it difficult to say the words, he has verbal problems. Actually the problem may be auditory. If you are a parent trying to find out how to teach your kid to read, you should find out if his problem is auditory. When a child is a poor reader, he may have difficulties hearing the differences in letter sounds. Some children cannot distinguish the sound difference among the five short vowels.

Some children have a harder time recalling letter sounds accurately. This problem with recall results in a more difficult letter-sounds blending to produce syllables or words. It is clear that if your child is like this, he will not learn using the traditional methods and there are special ways you can use how to teach your kid to read.

Children normally learn to read utilizing three methods of instruction or a combination of the three: phonics, auditory training and phonemic awareness training. Employing only one of three will only have positive results for a few children. Your efforts in learning how to teach your kid to read should include learning to improve his auditory skills, teaching him phonics and giving him phonemic awareness training to be effective.

Some programs for phonemic awareness focus on phonemes or individual sounds that blend together to form words. Efficient and effective phonics instruction looks at how children focus attention on the letter-sound patterns. Clinical studies and studies published by the National Reading Panel have stated that teaching phonics and phonemic awareness is the most effective method for teaching young children to read and write.

>> Click here to discover how to easily teach your child to read in 12 weeks or less

Do you know what the “Matthew Effect in Reading” is and what it refers to? This term originated from a passage in Matthew’s Gospel.  In sociology, this is where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In Education, the “Matthew Effect” is used to describe the effect of how new readers develop the ability to read. It is used to describe how early success in acquiring reading skills leads to greater success later on in reading skills development, and conversely, a poor skilled reader who fails to develop proficient reading skills by grade 4 will likely have a life long problem with reading and acquiring new skills.

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Studies have found that when kids begin school with a solid foundation of reading skills, they will continue to achieve success in reading and learning new skills. These children generally enter school with a good knowledge of the alphabet, have some conceptual knowledge of print, and have developed some level of phonemic awareness.

On the other hand, there are children who have not develop these important foundational skills, and will struggle through school and have a difficult time learning new skills. They will get left behind by their peers.

More importantly, the reading gap between kids who just start school are quite easily overcome with the proper teachings and some extra attention. However, if you look at the graph above, as each grade progresses, the gap in reading skill between children with and children without foundation skills grows by leaps and bounds, and it becomes extremely difficult to close this gap after grade four.

What’s more disturbing is that 38% of all grade 4 students in the US cannot achieve the basic level of reading skills as defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks students academic performance nationally. Had these poor skilled readers had proper reading lessons early on – once they begin school or even before they enter school – they would not be poor achievers when it comes to reading.

If this has you concerned for your kids development and education, there’s no need to worry. It’s a rather simple process to teach kids to read. In fact, language learning begins right at birth, and children as young as two years old can learn to read fluently. Children who learn to read at a young age will go on to excel at reading and other academic endeavors. It is a known fact that the more you read, the more you know, and the smarter you become – this is especially true for young children in the early stages and formative years of life.

We taught our kids reading very early on. All of our children learned to read by age 2, and by the time they were 3, they were reading children’s books on their own. It’s not difficult to teach kids to read – we spend less than 10 minutes each day with our children going through reading lessons, helping them develop crucial skills and at the same time stimulating intellectual development.

>> Click here to discover how to easily teach your children to successfully read

In our previous post, we had a video of our 3 year old daughter reading a children’s book titled “A Dollar for Penny”. You might wonder: “how does a child as young as only 3 years old learn to read at such a level?”

I’m not going to make any assumptions with regards to her level of reading skills; however, by the time our daughter was 3 and a half, she can easily read step 3 books in the Step Into Reading children’s books. So, just how is a 3 year old child able to develop superb reading abilities? Is it because she’s an exceptionally bright child, or is it because of the systematic approach we took in teaching her reading, and helping her develop phonemic awareness?

I’m very much leaning towards the latter – helping our children develop phonemic awareness. What is phonemic awareness?

In the English language, words are made up individual units of sound, and these smallest units of sound are known as “phonemes”, and phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and work with these smallest units of sound. To adults, this concept is extremely obvious – the 3 sounds of /c/ /a/ /t/ blends together to say the word “cat”. However, to a child, this concept is very obscure, and it is not something easily grasped by a young child.

For us, especially for me, I spent hours upon hours poring through studies, research papers, and articles on the topic of teaching kids to read and helping them develop literacy skills. And the lasting impression I gathered from my research is that phonemic awareness is the key to teaching kids and reading. We set a goal to help our children develop phonemic awareness, helping them become aware of the very important fact that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, and we did this through a very systematic approach starting with simple letter names and letter sounds.

While phonological awareness is a step in the right direction, it is phoneme awareness that is essential for young children to develop a keen appreciation for the connection between letters, letter sounds, and words. For example, the letter A makes the /A/ (“ah”) sound and so on. There are hundreds, if not thousands of studies in the past several decades which have highlighted the fact that phonemic awareness is essential to the process of learning to read, and that some reading failures can be linked to the lack of phonemic awareness.

If your goal is to teach your child to read, then the first and foremost task is to help your child develop phonemic awareness.

>> Click here to learn more about the systematic approach we used to teach our children to successfully read