When should we start teaching our children to read, and how?

Early Learning Teaching Your Child to Read
1

New section of my essay. Anyone have anything to add?

This question is really a topic for another essay. Moreover, I can speak only from my own experience and amateur study of the topic. So I feel comfortable offering just a few pieces of advice, most of which I have learned from others.

• It is a great idea to start reading to your baby as early as the baby will pay attention. (I could hold my one-month-old baby’s attention for five minutes with a simple board book.) By six months, some babies can sit in their parents’ laps for a long time; when he was a baby, I frequently sat my first in my lap and read a dozen board books to him for an hour. It doesn’t hurt to read to a baby; most babies, I gather, like it a lot, especially if it’s “cuddle time” and you use funny voices and point at pictures and make it interactive.
• Read a lot of ABC books, even to a baby. This is the fun and easy way to learn the alphabet.
• As to when to start using presentations, I did that with my second child at about the same time I started reading to him; I guess I could recommend that to anyone. A good presentation is like a book, so if you are reading books to your child, you can do presentations too. Of course, if your baby cannot focus on a computer or TV screen from your lap, or on cards, you might have to wait. Or—as we’ve done—use an iPad within his range of focus!
• Get down on the floor with your child and play with letter magnets, blocks, and alphabet toys. Emphasize the sounds of the letters, and practice sounding out the simplest words like “go” and “me” and “cat.”
• As to when to start Your Baby Can Read, or other similar products, I haven’t made up my mind on that. I’m not sure when we’ll start showing it to my second. Possibly we’ll start it when he is three or six months, and possibly we’ll wait until he is very familiar with his letters. With my first, we didn’t start YBCR until he was 22 months, he knew his alphabet well, and could sound out some simple words. By age four he ended up reading as well as any baby who started YBCR at three months.
• When your child has started learning the alphabet, start using the wonderful Starfall.com website to build on that basis.
• If you have any desire to follow a phonics flashcards program such as we did, I would recommend waiting on using the cards until your child has mastered both the names and the sounds of the letters, especially the consonants. (The first sets of my cards actually teach the short vowel sounds.) Your child should also be able to learn to say the words out loud.
• Going forward, keep reading. Especially after your child starts to learn to read, move your finger under the words as you read.

2

I’m not sure if this is within the scope of your essay, but I can add:

  • It is possible to teach a child to read several languages simultaneously, especially if the languages are radically different from each other such as English and Chinese.

  • Once a child has a strong grasp of English phonics, you can introduce reading in other alphabet-based languages such as Spanish, French, etc. I suppose one benefit of starting to teach reading in English early (using YBCR, LR, or other methods) is that the earlier the child is reading phonetically in English, the earlier you can introduce other languages, if you are so inclined, thus taking full advantage of that period when they are able to pick up foreign languages easily (0-6 years).

Also,

  • When she is reading by herself, I allow her to choose whatever she is comfortable reading, but when I am reading with her, I try to choose books which are slightly above her current reading level to challenge her but not too far above as to frustrate her.

Thanks!

3

All of what you said sounds good to me. Start early and be consistent.

4

I do not think there is one way to teach reading and nor do I think that teaching reading MUST start at a certain age - each method and even every age has its pros and cons. Nonetheless if I was advising someone or telling them what has worked for me this is what I would say:

Teaching reading starts even before birth when children first hear language as reading is simply another expression of language.

I would advise any parent to start reading to their child as early as possible - if a parent likes reading then start reading to them in the womb and if you happen to have time to read your adult books aloud when they are very young then do that too. If a child will sit still and stay awake for story then go ahead and read to them - I would advise all parents to have introduced reading to their children before the child is one year old and preferable well before that (5-6 months is often a good time)

Buy books that a child can hold, play with, bite and use all his/her senses on as this will increase enjoyment. Let your children see you reading from a young age.

Introduce print as early as possible also - print is all around us and it is very easy to introduce - use books with single words per page written in large font and point to the words, show them a stop sign, point to shop names - esepcially anything written in big font when they are small. Show them the writing on their cereal box, headlines in the newspaper you are reading, wherever you see print let them see it too.

As soon as the child begins to speak or even earlier introuce the concept that words can also be written - write the words they love (Mummy, Daddy, baby, dog etc) big on cards and show it to them especially associating it with the word and thing the understand - make text meaningful.

Continue to read books and introduce stories to them before two years of age (longer stories (as in not just single words)with some plot) Introduce the alphabet:

there are a number of ways to do this and they all seem to work. To read children need the phonetic alphabet so you can decide: teach only the phonetic alphabet and its symbols or teach both the names and the phonetic sound they make (a bit like the cow says moo, letter A says “a”) Both methods do work so the second method may take longer to teach.

Go from teaching words to phrases and sentences - do not expect a child to read a sentence before he/she can read the words - the word is the basic unit of language (phonics is actually not the basic unit of language as it has no meaning) and meaning is what language is all about. You can teach either sight words or phonics and both work, however in the end the child will need BOTH! It is easier to teach a young child sight words because they mean something than to teach phonics first. However they can also be taught somewhat simultaneously as young as about 18 months to two years.

Use any means at your disposal. You do not have to follow only one method to teach a very young child - the younger the child the less confusion there is when using multiple methods as they are absorbing everything from the environment and are used to doing things in many forms. Teach when your child is awake and alert. Never if they are bored or uninterested, hungry or tired.

Do NOT use formal lessons - lessons should be very very short and stopped before the child wants them to stop. Lessons should not really be lessons - they should be games and should suit the age of the child and also his/her interests.

Do not bore the child - know when to move on, don’t push but neither hold your child back. Believe that they can same as you did when they learnt to walk. Continue to point out words around your child and once they know the phonetic alphabet sound out words for them, without testing them until they can do it themselves. Gradually introduce the harder phonics rules so they can be independent readers. Introduce books taht are exciting and relevant to the child and read with them and to them still. If they want to read alone leave them to it.

Let your child lead but keep trying new things as the child has less knowledge of what is available and until he/she has seen the options you will not know what fascinates and interests him and what works for him. Go easy on the spending when teaching your child to read - it is quite possible to teach a child to read without spending any money, but in some cases the programmes if used right help you do it much more easily and with far less work. You will also need to spend some money on books at some stage as they are what a child falls in love with.

Starfall, Little Reader, Doman books, early readers and home made flashcards I got the most use of but there are many other products and aids that have worked very well for many people.

Never tell someone that how they teaching is wrong - they very seldom are - there is no right or wrong way to teach reading though there are more and less successful methods. The earlier you start the more leeway you have - children at that age learn despite what we do. Nonetheless having a good method does help parents.

5

Another new bit from my essay in progress:

…an unappreciated point, though it is perfectly obvious: once your child has learned how to read, she does not need to re-learn. Simply learning to decode the language phonetically is, for some children, very stressful and difficult. What if it turns out that those children, the ones who find learning to read really difficult at age six, could have learned how to read quite easily when their brains were more plastic and more receptive to it? What I am suggesting sounds ridiculous: perhaps, totally contrary to popular belief and practice, as well as expert opinion, the first years are actually the “developmentally appropriate” time for learning to read. If it turns out that most babies can be taught to read without much difficulty, then it is possible that we will teach our babies to read because we do not want them to struggle with reading when they are five, six, or seven.

We all think of early reading as a way to give our children the ability to read as an advantage and a source of enjoyment and discovery. But it is also a bit of insurance–against reading problems in the ordinary years in which reading is learned.

6

I agree with you totally DadDude though I must say that in our family early reading has become the norm with all of us knowing how to read before we hit school and now that we are on the next generation we are also teaching before they reach school. We are not just doing it to prevent problems later on, but because we believe that it is easier to teach a child when they are young ( a toddler) than when they are older and also that they actualy want to learn young whereas by 7 it is often a chore and a struggle and they are no longer interested.

Apparently there was study done a very long time ago that showed that second langauges were best taught starting at age 4 (and I mean as a second language rather than as a child who is bilingual) and yet the education department here did not want children to start second languages til 8 or 9 years old so they refused to publsih or make public the study and to this day second language studies at school are still started at 8-9 years old.

7

Good stuff DadDude,

One of my main motivations for teaching my boy to read (there were so many) was that I liked the idea of his reading ability being on par with his receptive language ability or at least close, I’ve found it tends to lie somewhere between his receptive and expressive language - now that gap is closing everything is becoming equal.

By age five or six, the book a learner reader is capable of reading is very different to the books they are capable of comprehending. This makes instilling a passion for the joy of reading difficult. How exciting can “A fat cat sat on a mat” be when they are capable of composing much more detailed narrative on a subject like dinosaurs during play?

Reading is an extension of language, so whatever language your baby is learning from birth, it makes sense to teach them the different forms the language can take.

If I had my time over (my son will always be an only child) I would have started brail and signing simultaneously rather than trying to fit them in later.

I too was taught to read and do maths very early. It meant a whole heap of things throughout life were easier for me (extra curricula activities and homework were never a problem I was able to cope because I had such good foundations). I want the same for my son.

Hope that made sense - I’m a bit tired.

As for the how - as long as it is stress free, non results-orientated and a time of joy and bonding the method comes close to being irrelevant, except… I really feel the media has to be well thought out and tailored to the parent and child together.

A parent who has no time would be perhaps not be able to do a program at all without using the tv or computer. There are those who have no tv or computer. We must choose that which is within our means and abilities so as to make sure the entire process is joyous.

There are many cases throughout history of young children learning to read and their caregivers all used different methods, but were successful. It is timing and demeanor that will make it work I think.