3 Tips to help your child to learn to READ

With so much information available on the internet it can get confusing and overwhelming to know the right way to help your kids learn to read.

Reading is a critical skill and is actually is very easy to teach it to your kids if done in the right way.

In this post , I’ll share with you my 3 most effective strategies that I have myself used for my child.

TIP #1 – FOCUS ON PHONICS

Recognizing letters and saying letter names is great but if you really want your kids to be able to read then they should also be knowing the letter sounds correctly because it is the most essential element of reading.

Now the big question is do we teach all the letter sounds at once or break them into parts . Honestly , it very much depends on child’s learning capabilities and if you think all at once can be a little overwhelming then these six letter sounds should be taught first – ‘s’ , ‘a’ , ‘t’ , ‘p’ , ‘i’ , ‘n’.

And once they are able to say the sounds correctly they can learn to blend and decode the words.

TIP #2 – BLEND THE SOUNDS

There is no reading without Blending the sounds together !!

Blending is the buzz word and while there are different ways of teaching blending , what worked for us was continous blending and can be taught in a very simple way .

You can use our FREE BLENDING MAT printable to practice different words.

Remember that blending the sounds correctly can take some time so it’s ok if they don’t get it right at the first time , practicing every day will make the difference.

TIP #3 – MAKE IT FUN WITH GAMES AND ACTIVITIES

Reading needs a lot and a lot of everyday practice . So if you make your child sit and practice in the same way everyday then it can become very boring for them and they may soon loose interest in reading.

So how do we make it Fun and Engaging for them?

Well , the answer is simple – ‘ACTIVITIES’ and ‘GAMES’ that are fun , playful and engaging aka ‘Play based learning’.

I have shared 100’s of activities from phonics to blending and even spelling charts that we have done at home . In fact by the age of 5 yrs he was able to read big passages that included digraphs and trigraphs and other tricky spelling rule , all thanks to the activities we did.

You can use all these strategies and ideas for your children too without scrolling through Pinterest.

For fun activity ideas visit – mybusykid on Instagram and also checkout additional FREE resources on our FREE PRINTABLE section.