Helping Your Child Learn To Read

Helping your child learn to read is the most important step in laying the foundation for your child’s education. By helping your child learn to read, you are not only educating your child, you are also building your child’s self confidence as well as forming a lasting bond between you and your child. Reading at home, even when your child can barely hold a book and turn a page, makes reading and reading materials familiar to the infant. It will become a part of his childhood, similar to toys.
 

Making reading a habit or a part of the daily routine of your child’s life, makes reading less of a chore. Educators say that encouraging reading at home is the basic step in helping your child read. Parents have to be extremely patient and resilient, when tackling reading at home. In your efforts in helping your child learn to read, you might have to read a particularly favorite book of your child over and over again for a long period of time. But, if that is what interests your child, then you have to persevere. Even though you might read the same book countless times, you can make each time enjoyable by making story time interactive. When you are helping your child learn to read, you can change your voice according to the characters, come up with different endings to the story, ask your child to narrate the story to you and discuss the story, the pictures and the sound of words. Persuade your child to ask questions, this fuels their natural curiosity and eagerness to know “what happens next”. This in turn will propel them to venture on their own and read by themselves.
 

When you are helping your child to read, make sure you use a dictionary when you come across difficult words. For a young child, a picture dictionary can open up unexplored worlds to a young imaginative mind. Enroll your child at your local library or lending book store. Encourage them to venture in to books written on different subjects. Another important aspect when it comes to helping your child learn to read is, to show interest on what your child learns at school. Follow it up with more reading material and maybe a field trip.

As your child gets older and more confident, reverse the roles. You be the listener and let your child read the story to you. Start with simple books which only have a few pages. Once your child finishes reading the book, she will feel a sense of accomplishment. This will fuel her to read more and achieve more. When you are helping your child learn to read, don’t just stick to books. There is plenty of reading material in our surroundings. This could be billboards, labels, road signs, posters, basically anything with letters and words on it. By helping your child learn to read at a very young age, you instill in them a sense of accomplishment and worth, which will go a long way in your child’s future.