There is an art to teaching your child to read. You need a combination of patience, encouragement, and intelligence, as well as a good understanding of the concepts involved in teaching phonics, using high-frequency words, and finding a method that engages your children without overwhelming them.

To be a good teacher or a school teacher’s assistant, you must be able to maintain variety in the lessons you give the child and this must be done in teaching preschools, kindergarten or school nurseries and beyond. I hope that you are one of the parents who realizes and recognizes the great amount of help that can be found both online and offline in your efforts to help teach your child to read.

Preschool

The work in preschool is “phonemic awareness” to start making your child aware of the differences between sounds. Just by hearing the flight of an airplane, you can ask your child what it is. It seems natural to you to know what that sound is, but a child may not have made that connection yet. Cars, trucks, and helicopters make different sounds, and when your child can recognize these sounds, then he or she may be ready to start differentiating sounds in words.

They may not yet know the principle of cause and effect, and until you teach them that hitting a fence with a stick makes a noise like a drum, they may not appreciate it. Once you tell them, they won’t forget.

A good guide to see if your child is ready is to play the game What “Word” Starts With? For example, if your child is named David, you might ask: How does David begin by emphasizing the first D sound in David? Children love to do this for a few minutes a day.

reading letters

Recognition of letters and sounds of those letters is a similar process. The child needs to recognize the letter visually in order to guess the pronunciation. Once that recognition is achieved, your child is ready to move on to matching letters. There are many online resources that provide phonics games, phonics activities, and sight word lists that you can use to help teach your child to read. Check out the resource box at the end of this article for links to many places where you can find great activities to do with your child.

High-frequency word lists

Once your child can recognize enough letters, you’ll start confusing them by adding sight words! Sight words are words that are not pronounced phonetically. Therefore, they should be learned by sight rather than using the individual letter sounds to spell them. There are many sight word lists available online and offline and they are an essential part of any program that helps teach your child to read.

All of these methods to help teach children to read can be combined and enjoyed by parents and children. Applying these teachings along with the resources you can find online and offline to give your child a richer learning experience is a great way to advance your plan for teaching children to read.