Reading is undoubtedly one of the essential habits your kid needs to inculcate early in their life. Learning to read can be one of the first few challenges a toddler would face and the parents trying to teach them. Reading is not something that comes naturally to kids, nor does it happen overnight. Learning to read is a continuous step-by-step process. But, how do we do it? How do children learn to read?
The process should start with teaching them the alphabets and the words, and then move to read sentences, paragraphs, etc.; eventually, they start reading fluently with great ease. As parents, you must be wondering when do children learn to read? As per the studies, children usually learn to read and spell words starting from the age of 3, and they learn to read sentences at around 5-7 years.
How do Children Learn Reading?
In this article on ‘ how to learn children reading’, we will go through several steps and applied strategies that will make this process easy, fun, and faster in the right way. First, we will start with how to teach children reading words and then move to read complete stories/ texts.
#1. Steps to Learn Reading the Letters
Don’t Focus on Teaching in Alphabetical Order
Teaching children to read in alphabetical order would mean a mix of easy, hard, and difficult ones. Instead, starting to teach children with easy letters would help them learn faster and motivate them to learn more, even difficult ones.
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Focus on Both Writing and Sound
While teaching your kids to learn the alphabet, you should keep in mind that they need to remember the letters visually and memorise the sound of each letter. Some letters may also have a mix of two sounds. Learning these sounds will make the reading process easier and help in further steps.
#2. Reading Through Repetition: Put up the Charts Everywhere
As mentioned above, children learning reading is a process; it wouldn’t happen in one session, but it will take time and a lot of patience. One such step in the process would be to put up charts on what your kids have to learn in places where they spend most of their time. The charts may be of letters, words, or stories according to the child’s phase of learning.
Make sure your children read them regularly and memorise them. Change the charts frequently and upgrade them accordingly.
#3. Reading Words
#To teach your children words, start with easy words, ideally of two or three letters, like “go” or “sit”. Make your children spell the sound of the individual words and then combine those all together to spell those words.
#Articles, be-verbs and prepositions, like, the, are, a, in, at, etc., are used in almost every sentence. Teaching them to read such words and their meanings first will cover a significant part and help them start with the actual sentences.
#Teach your kids word families or rhyming words. Examples: cat, mat or hen, ten. This way, your kids will learn many words at once with similar pronunciation patterns, making the learning process easy for them.
#4. Read Bedtime Stories
Reading bedtime stories to kids is one of the favourite parent-child activities of all times. But, for a change, to improve productivity, parents can switch roles and help children read bedtime stories. They don’t have to dive into it all together at once. Parents can start with reading the story first, then ask children to try with a few words, some sentences or an interesting portion of the story.
This is one of the best activities that would get kids to like reading.
#5. Surround them with Print-rich Environment
The process of learning should be repetitive, which means it should be limited to just one hour or two at a particular time in the day. Bring home different labels, books, kid magazines, charts, posters, etc. That would help them constantly remember what they have already learnt and repeat them constantly for retention.
If they don’t remember and panic about it, calm them down and ask them to slowly remember, starting with individual sounds that make words and then sentences.
#6. Include Fun Activities in the Schedule
List of Words that Start With
This activity will help you assess how well your child can retain what’s learnt in this reading process. Ask them to prepare a list of words they remember, say words starting with V or any other letter. After this, ask them to read those words out loud, and later, if they are in that stage, then tell them to read sentences with those words.
If they cannot do that, you can write the sentences and ask them to read or vice-versa.
Expect What’s in the Next Page
Young kids are always excited to read comics or other storybooks. Especially in books that contain dialogues, ask them to read the current page aloud and, before turning it to the next page, make them anticipate what awaits. Ask them to tell it out loud and then turn the page and read it next. This builds curiosity and goads them on to adopt a reading habit.
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Final Thoughts
In addition to the above, you can try reading cartoons in subtitles, songs and rhymes, phonetics, and make them read every sign they see on the road to learning reading. The above tips, step-by-step process, and activities would help your kids learn reading easily.
Remember to infuse the learning activities with fun and engagement to help your kids learn faster. Regular practice, repetition, and concentration are most important for children to learn reading.
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