How To Help Your Child Learn To Read At Home
What can I do at home to help my child learn to read?
When helping children learn to read, one of the things that I recommend that parents have at home are really simple books. You'd be amazed when you look at pictures book and the type of books that we usually have. They're difficult; there's a lot of big words, there's a lot of big concepts. You're going to sit down to read and think, "Oh, how's my child ever going to do this? They only know the basic sounds." So, there's all different kinds of phonetic readers that you can buy to help a child learn to read, where there are little tiny stories: they're not super-fascinating stories but they're broken down. Some of them will only have the short "a" sound, some of them will only have the short "o" sound. They're really nice building blocks to help kids to begin reading on their own. The other thing you can always do to help their reading is have kids read to you - read it to them and then have them read it back. You want to keep practicing. You want to help improve the smoothness with which they can read. If it seems kind of choppy, do it again; just keep going over things. Use repetition to help children learn to read, because kids love to read books over and over again. Repetition is really a great at this young age, because it helps solidify the sight of words and the sounds. There's a set of books called "Bob's Books" and the Bob books go in levels. They come in boxes, they're little tiny paperbacks, but each one is coded to a particular sound, and so again you have your short "a" book to help children learn. The first book goes something like, "Matt. Matt sat. Matt and Pat sat on Matt's hat." It's very simple and the kids can really read it themselves. The books get harder as they go along, slowly improving a child's reading. There's another set of little books called "Now I'm Reading", and they also get progressively harder. They're a little cuter at the end as the illustrations are more colorful. These books have the same sort of idea for helping your child to read. They're very phonetic readers, and they're great for kids to really just start learning.
