How to Teach Your Kids to Read
How to Teach Kids to Read With Letter Name & Sounds
Teaching kids to read starts at home, and it is an endeavor that every parent should take a keen interest in. The process of learning to read always starts with language acquisition, and reading to your children early on helps them develop print awareness and print knowledge. Teaching a kid to read isn't an easy task, but it doesn't need to be difficult either. Learning to read will progress at different speeds depending on the age and maturity of the young child. I guarantee that there will always be frustrations when trying to teach a toddler to read, but by keep the teaching process simple and short, you can help minimize this.
It's not easy to teach a toddler to read - how do you even go about conveying the meaning of printed text to your child? How do you teach your toddler the completely strange idea that the funny lines and squiggles they see represents our spoken language? Even more importantly, how do you go about teaching your child the relationship of the letters, words, and sentences, and how to decipher all the text printed in books and elsewhere? Do you start with flash cards and get your toddler to "memorize" some words (shapes and configurations); do you teach the name of your child first, since they would definitely be interest in that; or do you follow a more systematic approach to learning to read by starting with the fundamental building blocks of print and text?
By the most basic fundamental building blocks, we mean the alphabet letters. In all, there are 26 letters in English going from A to Z; however, there are 40 plus phonemes represented by these letters or a combination of letters. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound.
It is important for one to realize that the the words in our spoken language are made up of phonemes, and it is these phonemes that makes a word sound the way it does. For example, why does the word BAT sound like BAT? This is because it contains 3 distinct phonemes represented by the 3 letters B A T, and the 3 phonemes are /b/, /a/, and /t/. The slashes denote sounds. For example, /b/ = "buh" or /a/ = "ah". With the exception of various sight words, the majority of the words in our language can be "broken down" into individual phonemes, and it is through this central concept of helping a child develop phonemic awareness that allows us to teach very young kids to read successfully.
Teaching a Kid to Read Starting With Letter Names and Sounds
The first step to teaching your kids to read is to start with learning the letter names and their associated sounds. There are 26 alphabet letters, and so you start with the 26 basic sounds associated with each of the letters. For example, the letter A makes an "ah" /a/ sound, or the letter B makes a /b/ sound. Of course, there are quite a few more phonemes above these initial 26 sounds, such as long vowel sounds and digraphs. For example, a short A makes an /a/ "ah" sound (as in MAT HAT BAT), and a long A makes an "ay" sound as in (MATE DATE). A digraph, on the other hand, is a combination of 2 characters to make one phoneme. For example, "ch" or "oo".
Why is it important to start teaching letter names and letter sounds? Wouldn't it be much simpler to just use flash cards or other learning to read TV/DVD programs?
Absolutely not.
Do you want to help you child memorize a select number of words, or do you want to teach them the method behind effective decoding and reading of all printed text? To do this, you need to start with the teaching of letter names and letter sounds - together. The focus on teaching letter names along with the associated sounds is important. Depending on which part of the world you live in, the education system has different methods for teaching children to read. For example, parents and educators in the United States stresses letter names with young children, while those in the UK starts with letter sounds. US children perform better at letter naming tasks while UK children perform better on letter sound tasks. [1]
So, do you start teaching letter names or letter sounds to your kids? I suppose if you lived in the US, it would be letter names, and if you lived in the UK, it would be letter sounds! Actually, the correct answer is to teach BOTH letter name and sound at the SAME time! Numerous scientific studies have found that teaching letter names along with the corresponding sound is superior than teaching either alone by itself. When children are given alphabet instruction through either combined letter name and sound, or letter sound only instructions, there is clear evidence of greater benefit of using combined letter names and sounds. [2] Letter-name knowledge has a significant impact on letter-sound learning. Other studies have even stated that there is very little value in teaching letter names and letter sounds separately.[3] What should be crystal clear is that to teach your kids reading you must teach letter names along with letter sounds.
Start with 1 or 2 consonants and a vowel, for example, A, B, and C. And you do not have to teach it in alphabetic order! In fact, it's easiest to start with some of the most commonly used letters such as A, D, E, S, T, etc... With just 2 consonants and a vowel you can start teaching the next step in learning to read - blending. For example, the letters A, B, and T can makes simple words such as AB, BAT, AT, or TAB. Learning to blend is matter to discuss in another article. Hope that I've convinced you here that it's best to teach letter name and sound together.
We have a superbly effective and simple program to help you teach your children to read. It starts with all the basics and shows you the most effective ways to teach your child to read. The lessons are short but effective, and take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. It is an exceptionally effective program that can teach children as young as 2 and 3 years old to read.
Click here to discover how you can easily teach your kids to read.
1. J Exp Child Psychol. 2009 Mar;102(3):323-41.
Learning to label letters by sounds or names: a comparison of England and the United States.
Ellefson MR, Treiman R, Kessler B.
2. Read Writ. 2010 Jul 1;23(6):607-626.
Fostering Alphabet Knowledge Development: A Comparison of Two Instructional Approaches.
Piasta SB, Purpura DJ, Wagner RK.
3. J Exp Child Psychol. 2009 Sep;104(1):68-88.
The genesis of reading ability: what helps children learn letter-sound correspondences?
Castles A, Coltheart M, Wilson K, Valpied J, Wedgwood J.
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