Top Tips for Teaching Your Child to Read

Reading is a skill that can help your child to learn more about the world and their passions. It’s a vital skill that can help to keep the brain active and stay healthy too. A prep school in Essex has created a great list of tips on how to teach your child to read for us to share with you.

Read to Your Child

Listening to you read can help your child to discover new words and help them to remember what their spellings looks like as you point them out. This is what’s known as listening vocabulary that can make identifying words easier when your child begins to read.

Phonetic Games

Children love playing games and phonetics games can help them to learn at the same time. Games like match and spell and online interactive games can increase your child’s familiarity with phonetics and give them the foundations needed to start reading. You can do this with what you have at home to find examples of items that begin with different letters and get them to create their own cards.

Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes can be extremely catchy and will have you chanting them by the time that your child is finished. They can make letters and sounds easy to remember and solidify your child’s learning so that they can begin to read. 

Explore Their Interests

To teach a child how to read, practice is essential. To encourage your child to read along with you, incorporate their interests by picking up a character book on their favourite TV show or a book on a topic that interests them. This will help them to stay engaged and want to keep reading.

Be Patient and Gentle

Reading can be very difficult for a child as it involves connecting knowledge of different sounds to solve what’s almost like a puzzle. If your child gets a word or sound wrong, remember to be patient and guide them gently to the right answer. While you can go through examples and give them a helping hand, try to get your child to read as many as they can and use praise to recognise their achievements.

Avoid Over Complication

At this stage, it’s important to not overcomplicate things and to only stick to lowercase letters and sounds. Refer to letters like ‘M’ (em) as ‘muh’ and its sound as ‘mmm’. While helping children with their homework this can be easily forgotten and is something to be mindful of.