Helping Your Child Become a Reader
Provided by U.S. Department of Education
Every step a child takes toward learning to read leads to another. Bit by bit, the child builds the knowledge that is necessary for being a reader. Over their first six years, most children:
- Talk and listen
- Listen to stories read aloud
- Pretend to read
- Learn how to handle books
- Learn about print and how it works
- Identify letters by name and shape
- Identify separate sounds in spoken language
- Write with scribbles and drawing
- Connect single letters with the sounds they make
- Connect what they already know to what they hear read
- Predict what comes next in stories and poems
- Connect combinations of letters with sounds
- Recognize simple words in print
- Sum up what a story is about
- Write individual letters of the alphabet
- Write words
- Write simple sentences
- Read simple books
- Write to communicate
- Read simple books
Children can take more than one of these steps at the same time. This list of steps, though, gives you a general idea of how your child will progress toward reading.
Learning About Print and Books
Reading together is a perfect time to help a late toddler or early preschooler learn what print is. As you read aloud, stop now and then and point to letters and words; then point to the pictures they stand for. Your child will begin to understand that the letters form words and that words name pictures. He will also start to learn that each letter has its own sound — one of the most important things your child can know when learning to read.
By the time children are four, most have begun to understand that printed words have meaning. By age five, most will begin to know that not just the story but the printed words themselves go from left to right. Many children will even start to identify some capital and small letters and simple words.
In late kindergarten or early first grade, your child may want to read on his own. Let him! But be sure that he wants to do it. Reading should be something he is proud of and eager to do and not a lesson.
How Does a Book Work?
Children are fascinated by how books look and feel. They see how easily you handle and read books and they want to do the same. When your toddler watches you handle books, she begins to learn that a book is for reading, not tearing or tossing around. Before she is three, she may even pick one up and pretend to read, an important sign that she is beginning to know what a book is for. As your child becomes a preschooler, she is learning that:
- A book has a front cover
- A book has a beginning and an end
- A book has pages
- A page in a book has a top and a bottom
- You turn pages one at a time to follow the story
- You read a story from left to right of a page
As you read with your four- or five-year-old, begin to remind her about these things. Read the title on the cover. Talk about the picture on the cover. Point to the place where the story starts and, later, where it ends. Let your child help turn the pages. When you start a new page, point to where the words of the story continue and keep following the words by moving your finger beneath them. It takes time for a child to learn these things, but when your child does learn them, she has solved some of reading's mysteries.
