How Kids Learn to Read
When Kids Learn to Read at a Young Age...
...they can become exceptionally fast and fluent readers with excellent reading comprehension abilities and a vast vocabulary. Language skills are central to early cognitive development in children, where the child is constantly making new language discoveries during play and interaction with others. Emerging literacy skills are built upon the language skills where the child listens to stories, learns to identify printed text, learns more about the alphabet letters and sound, and then begins to develop some basic reading skills.
So when do kids learn to read, and at what age can kids learn to read? While there's no definitive answer to this question, I think most might be thinking that the majority of children will learn to read once they start kindergarten and first grade. A few parents that are more proactive may start to teach their kids reading before kindergarten.
What if I told you that kids learn to read starting from when they are still babies? After all, most parents will take time to read story books and rhymes to their babies, and through this process of daily reading, the child is picking up essential language and verbal skills. At the same time, they are discovering and gaining some limited understanding of the relationship between the squiggly lines they see in their story books and the sounds that come out of your mouth while reading. Sometimes, you may even see your toddler flipping through their favorite books and pretend to "read".
How to Help Kids Learn to Read
By the time most children are in kindergarten, they have naturally developed some basic language and literacy skills where they know that printed text convey meaning and represent the spoken words of the English language. They understand that the printed "squiggles" can tell a story or communicate a message. While the child may know some alphabet letters, they may not know that different letters produce different sounds that combine to "say" the words in our language. This is a critical step for kids to learn the basics of reading. Parents, caregivers, and educators need to help the child know that different sounds are associated with letters - for example, pointing to a letter, saying its name, and then saying its sound.
Many adults take these for granted as reading is second nature for them, and not a whole lot of thought process is needed for a fluent reader. We simply glance at printed text and naturally "know" what we are reading. Things don't quite work that way for small kids and we need to be aware of that and help kids learn to read starting with the most basic building blocks. Since you've read this far, ask yourself this: how much thought process did it take to read this far? Probably not a whole lot for most adults. Now think about this: what makes a word, a word? What makes it sound the way it does? How do we "read" and "sound out" a complicated word that we're not so familiar with? Do you make a wild guess, or do you use a more systematic approach to read unfamiliar words?
This systematic approach and thought process to reading is called phonemic awareness. It is a keen awareness of the smallest units of sound, and how these combine to "say" the words. For example, the word CUP has 3 distinct phonemes to make it sound like 'CUP', and they are /c/ /u/ and /p/ sounds.
Kids are not born with phonemic awareness (PA), and must be taught to develop phonemic awareness skills to help them become fast and fluent readers. Large amounts of research have proven and demonstrated that PA is the best predictor of reading skills, and is absolutely essential in teaching children to become effective readers. PA can develop naturally overtime as children grow and gain more exposure and practice to reading and writing; however, poor reading abilities can always be linked back to having poor PA skills. There is a systematic way to teach phonemic awareness to very young children, and with it you can help your kids learn to read.
With Phonemic Awareness, learning how to read for kids can be accomplished at a very young age. Simple instructions combined with short and simple lesson plans can teach even 2 year old toddlers to read. That's not a typo, even 2 and 3 year old children can learn to read effectively if taught to read with a phonemic awareness based reading program. We taught all of our kids to read at just 2 and 3 years old using our PA focused program.
Click here to discover a simple, step-by-step program that will help you to teach your kids to read (see video for proof).
| 
