Help your preschoolar read-Sobya Imran

Learning to read is a process that begins a long time before your child enters kindergarten. Because reading and writing are based upon spoken language, you want to make sure your child has a language rich environment from birth. You need to be reading out loud to your child. You need to be singing to and with your children. You need to be speaking clearly and directly to your child so he can see your face to see how words are formed. You need to help your child become aware that words are made up of individual sounds. This skill is called phonemic awareness. We need to help them know that letters represent sounds, a skill that is called letter/sound recognition. After your child acquires the two basic skills for reading, phonemic awareness and letter/sound recognition, you will see a “burst” into reading, much like the “burst” into speech. There will be that magical day when your child discovers he can read. He will begin by reading one word at a time.

At first level of reading you need to offer vocabulary cards that have a picture and just one word, for example, a picture of an alligator and the word beneath it. These cards will give a visual clue to your child, and help them build word recognition.  At first the child may “sound” out the words, but through repetition, the eye and brain begin to remember a word at a time, so that the child can see the word “alligator” and know it and say it without consciously having to sound it out. Through repetition, the child develops a visual memory of a word, which makes reading faster and more enjoyable.

The second level is to read two or three words at a time.With your new reader, make little books that have lots of visual clues.

The Hat Book is one of my students’ favorite first books. We draw hats in ten different colors and write the words like The green hat ,the blue hat n so on. We make a booklet using half sheets of copy paper. We have a visual clue of what the words should say, plus we’ve written it ourselves.

 

The third level is to create books with five or more words in a complete sentence. You might do a hat book with sentences like these: The black hat is small. The red hat is large. The yellow hat is just right. After your child develops fluency with one sentence per page, begin to make books with two sentences per page, one underneath the other. The black hat is small.
It does not fit me.

 
At this point, your child is ready to start into books that have two or three lines of print per page. Some children may get to this point in a few weeks. For others it may be many months. The important thing is that you keep it fun and successful.

The road to reading is a long one, but when you are aware of the developmental needs of your child, it should be a smooth ride with very few bumps. 
Happy parenting :)