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Helping Your Child Learn to Read
Time4Learning
Builds Reading Skills Online
Dateline: 3/18/06
By John Edelson
Time4Learning Founder - Build Reading Skills Online
Learning to read is an exciting time for children and their
families. For many parents, helping their child learning to read
establishes a pattern for their involvement in their child's
academic education. Here are a few important hints.
Be Involved and Patient
Learning to read is the culmination of a great many learned
skills and developmental processes. Learning to read is a long-term
program. At times, there is no visible progress. At other times,
they make dramatic daily progress. In all cases, show patience,
confidence, and be encouraging of new skills. Learning to read
is like a marathon that involves climbing up mountains and over
diverse terrain: it is not a sprint and every child needs support
along the way. And like a marathon, there are many stages, each
with it's own challenges. From phonics through advanced reading
comprehension and critical thinking, there are new challenges
at each stage.
Learn about learning to read
There are many great books and websites on learning to read.
While you don't need to become knowledgeable about all the latest
theories about learning to read, there are some basics which
you should understand. While there are many sources, my favorites
are SEDL
or Todays
Learners. Time4Learning has an excellent free
newsletter that provides useful insights into how children
learn to read and how parents can help teach them. It points
to websites, articles, resources, and books with more info on
specific steps or issues in learning to read. Once you understand
the basic steps, you'll have a "map" or "schedule"
of the terrain that your marathon mountain climbing effort will
need to cover. If your child's development differs significantly
from the schedules, you should consult with specialists since
along the way, many children are found to have different sets
of strengths and weaknesses which sometimes require some specialized
help or intervention. Most differences provide interesting insight
into what makes your child special and do not change the overall
program significantly.
Learning to Read has a sequence
Just as children start by playing T-ball before playing baseball
with "pitched" balls, there are specific steps in learning
to read. Trying to teach the steps out of sequence can frustrate
your child (and you). For instance, prior to successfully learning
phonics, the child should master a set of pre-reading skills
including understanding basic print concepts, discerning the
sounds, understanding that words are made up of sounds which
they need to think about as interchangeable parts (ie phonemic
awareness), and memorizing the alphabet. To help parents
understand the steps in learning to read, look at The
Reading Skills Pyramid. And while most children do follow
this sequence, be aware that each child is different and that
there are a great number of variations. It is great fun to realize,
even in the prereading phase, how much ground is already covered
once a child can play rhyming games, understanding thousands
of words of vocabulary, and likes hearing you read bed-time stories
out of a book.
The First Steps in Learning to Read
is Multimodal
Learning to read is easiest if you involve all the children's
learning
styles and modalities. They should see the words on wall
posters, have toys in the shapes of letters, draw or trace the
letters, play letter games on the computer, watch educational
programs (Sesame Street) that introduce the letters, and of course,
listen to stories in books. Most children love learning that
their name can be written down and are highly motivated to learn
to recognize their own name. Each of these different activities
helps develop prereading skills.
A Program to Becoming a Successful
Reader
Time4Learning
is a great example of a reading curriculum. Let's look at the
range of activities that are taught as children learn to "decode
words" and build basic "reading comprehension skills".
These steps are primarily achieved in the years up to third grade.
At the preschool level, lessons teach verbal comprehension, build
vocabulary skills, develop phonemic awareness through rhyming
games, and build other prereading skills. By kindergarten, the
program is teaching phonics with more vocabulary, comprehension,
and listening exercises (recognizing word families and syllables).
From third to eighth grade, reading comprehension skills are
the main focus with grammar, word roots, punctuation, and critical
thinking as major strands.
Writing Skills Should be Developed
Simultaneously
Most programs, including Time4Learning, now include a writing
program from the earliest ages. There are two reasons for this
renewed focus on writing: one, research shows that writing skills
helps build reading skills. Secondly, employers (and standardized
tests) are increasingly focused on strong writing skills. Teaching
writing starts at the prereading level where there are "tell
a story" exercises using paint programs. The level progresses
incrementally so by third grade, the children are using outliners
and graphic organizers to organize thoughts prior to writing.
The goal is for them to construct sentences and paragraphs into
coherent clear essays.
Helping your Child Learn to Read -
Summary
Parents enthusiasm for teaching their children to read should
be channelled into useful daily activities. Meaningful education
is a marathon and not a sprint; it is not always smooth "road
work" but involves working through diverse terrains. Be
very dubious of any "magic shortcuts". The first step
is for parents to learn the basics of the steps in learning to
read. Once you understand the overall path, you'll see how to
use the broad array of tools such as learning toys, computer
programs, rich daily conversations, daily reading sessions, and
a comprehensive curriculum.
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- Online Interactive
Curriculum
Time4Learning is a new approach to education that takes advantage
of today's technology. It's a convenient, homeschool online curriculum
that combines education with interactive fun for children, preschool
to eighth grade.
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Explore Reading with Amazon.com
Best Books for Kids Who (Think They) Hate to Read
125 Books That Will Turn Any Child into a Lifelong Reader
by Laura Backes
- Essentials
of Children's Literature
by Carl M. Tomlinson, Carol Lynch-Brown
Reading
Lists for College-Bound Students (3rd Edition)
by Doug Estell
The New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children
Eden Ross Lipson
Best Selling
Homeschooling Books
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