How to teach reading to 4 and 5 year-olds

Aliteracy is defined as a lack of the reading habit.  It turns out, many folks that can read, don't want to read.  The lessons that follow helps children find a love of reading.  Creating readers that want to read is a matter of giving kids choices--kids need a wide variety of appropriately leveled books to choose from.  Kid's also need to move along at their own pace.

Step 1 Letter Study

In terms of letter study, kids should be introduced to 2 new letters a week.  The focus of letter study is learning the name and sound that each letter makes.  The best letters to start with are the letters in a child's name.  After that move on to letters that get used a lot--t, s, c, m, a etc...

Write you chosen letters on colorful construction paper.  Then go through the cards with your child.  Talk about the name and sound of each letter.  Try to elicit the name and sound of the letters after a few days.  Each week add two or three letters to your letter cards.

If you're interested in teaching letters look here:

http://www.instructables.com/id/A-kinestetic-approach-to-reading-skills-How-to-te/

Comments

[MisterQED]

My daughter is now four and is reading very well. We started with consonant and short vowels. This allowed her to read simple books. We are now moving on to the complicated rules and sounds of long vowels. This system would seem to confuse the child with long vowels early, when it could be put off until they have built up more confidence.

[atomicthomas]

Good point.

Folks read using three basic skills:

• Recognition of meaning of word via the word's shape
Kids recognize a word by its shape

• Recognition of the meaning of a word via the sounds the letters make
Kids recognize a word by looking at the sounds of letters in words

• Recognition via the context of the sentence the word is embedded in.
Kids recognize a word by reading the words around it


Kid's can learn of the above mentioned strategies simultaneously. When we teach kids to recognize words by their shape, we teach them site words. Some whole words are considered "sight words"--words that you don't usually use letter sounds to figure out. The word 'the' is a great example of a site word. The word 'the' starts with the /th/ sound. Beginning readers usually don't have any understanding of how the 'th' spelling makes a sound like /th/. As it turns out, kids can recognize the word 'the' even if they don't have a grasp of the letter sound in it.

When I show kids the word 'the" I don't have them sound out the first sound. They should simply look at the word 'the' and recognize it by its shape. I would encourage kids to recognize the first sound in site words beginning with single consonants and vowels.