TEACH MY CHILD TO READ

INTRO - How To Teach My Child to Read
by Dr. Roberta Saal

Early Reading begins with your child’s basic experiences with the environment, with speaking, listening and communicating, and with experiences interacting with the written word. Since the focus on reading is always comprehension, it makes sense that activities and games related to improving your child’s listening, speaking and vocabulary comprehension will be the most helpful activities to help prepare your early reader. That’s why the activities described in the articles on this website are focused on fun ways to playfully enjoy interacting with your child without ever losing sight of how important these activities are to reading comprehension.

The activities and games described on this website are easy to understand and easy to do with your child. What isn’t easy is repeating the activities multiple times in a variety of ways! Just think about what it’s like to learn something new. If you just move your salt shaker to a different place on the kitchen counter, it will take you about 70 repetitions of going to the new place when you want the salt before you do it without going to the old place first. And we wonder why a child doesn’t remember a new word when we explain it once! So, be prepared to add in new activities to your daily life and make it a common, daily practice to play with words and language and meaning and stories and writing! Many parents read to their children, but you want to be the parent who goes beyond just reading the story aloud to your child. You want to be the parent and child who get excited about interacting with language and stories.

Too often in early reading instruction we encounter children who are able to “say” the words on a page without understanding what they have read. We instructors refer to these children as “word callers.” Although the child can say the words, the meaning of the words, and therefore the meaning of the story are not understood by the child. It’s surprising to parents that a child can actually say all of the words correctly and not be able to answer even basic questions about the story. This often happens because the adult’s focus has been only on recognizing and saying words correctly. The adult spends hours using flash cards with the child rather than providing experiences with vocabulary building, language comprehension, story language, word characteristics, story illustrations, and purposeful listening.

The activities on this website are by no means the only ones that help your early reader. But, they are a starting point for you, as the adult, to understand how to explore this whole idea of language learning with your child. Language is used to express oral comprehension. And the written words are our oral words written down. So our goal for our early readers must always focus on comprehension in oral language, reading and writing.