How to Teach Your Child to Read

Video Transcript

PATTY BURROWS: How to teach your child to read? Reading is a very important skill that children need to have throughout their entire life so it's never too early to start working on reading skills. There are many, many methods of teaching reading and I just want to go over a few, important facts. Phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is very important because children need to know the sounds letters make in order to be able to put those letters together to make words. Also, how well they can manipulate those sounds is also important. For instance, one of the things that you want to do is you want to play rhyming games. For instance you have the word "cat" and "hat," you talk about how those words sound alike or rhyme. You may also want to use a book that has some rhymes in them. Some of the old Mother Goose rhymes are very good for that. You also may want to use a board and actually draw the letters on the board. Let the child trace the letters. Say what the letters sound like. Tell them the sounds of the letters. Then you're going to move to sound blending, actually putting those sounds together and making a word. For example, "cat" would be "cc--aa--tt." When you put those sounds together it makes a word. It's important for your toddler or your child to know that putting sounds together is what makes words. So important things to remember when teaching your child to read is phonemic awareness, sound blending, letter recognition all go together to begin teaching a child to read.