Usually babies begin to read with a form of flashcard sight word approach and are then meant to progress to reading books. Depending on the method used, some problems might occur in making the adjustment to books - I wondered if anyone had come across any problems and how they went about solving them. Here are some that I have come across:
1. Going from large print to small print
Ideally the print should have been gradually decreased in size when starting couplets or sentences, however if this isn’t done and one goes straight from large flashcards to books then you may need to introduce large flashcards with small writing and show the child that the small and large words have the same shape. It is a fairly easy problem to solve and the child should be able to read the book very soon afterwards.
2. Enjoying the flashcards more than the book
My sisters child wants to build sentences with the flashcards but she is not so keen on reading the book. We got her to read the book by telling her that for every different word she read in the book we would give her the same flashcard word until she had a big pile of words - that made it fun again.
3. Capital letters
Capitals should ideally be taught with the small letters - try introducing names, showing words at teh supermarket where everything is in capitals or writing words with only small letters on one side of your flashcard and then the same word starting with a capital on the reverse side.
4. Predicting words like “the,” “a” etc
This is actually not such a problem as many people do predict text in sentences without reading the full sentence however when a child is young the predictions are not very accurate. Perhaps try making these words into flashcards and ask your child to put his/her finger on “the” etc to make sure they do know the word before pointing it out in a sentence again.
These are just examples of things I have come across - if you know of anymore things you have had to deal with, perhaps with your own children or have a problem you are not sure how to approach, please write it here.