Preparing Your Infant to Read

If you want your child to become any early reader—as early as, say, three or four years old—you must prepare his or her reading readiness even when he or she is only one-month old. Education should start from the first days of an infant's life: that is, the time when you start shaping his or her life. You can begin teaching your child reading before he or she can read, just as you can teach your child talking before he or she can talk. Parents can always teach their children ahead of their development. Remember, you are not forcing your child to learn: you are merely providing him or her with the opportunity.

Developing Motor Abilities and Sensory Perceptions

The development of motor abilities, closely  integrated with  that of sensory perceptions of your child, provides the  basis for your child’s future reading readiness.

Motor abilities

Try to open and loosen the fist (the first month).

Gently, stroke and massage your child’s fists on both sides until he or she opens his or her fists. Without the loosening of your child’s fists, your child cannot learn the grasping reflex, which is vital to learning to hold a pen to write.

Create the grasping reflex (the first month).

Make your child open his or her fists and then place your finger into his or her hands such that your child will grasp it. Alternately, using your own hand, open and close your child’s fists until he or she learns and masters the grasping reflex.

Stimulate the deliberate and active grasping (the second month).

Place various bright objects within the movement range of your child’s hands. Do not place them directly into your child’s unclenched fists, but rather guide them so that the grasping becomes incidental.

Sensory perception

Develop visual perception (the third month).

Teach and train your child to follow moving objects with his or her eyes by increasing the speed of the moving objects and the range of their movement. Also, teach your child  to follow these objects from various positions.

Develop the coordination of hearing and sight (the third month).

Show your child  the  connection  between  what  he or she  sees  and hears simultaneously: your child must learn that when he or she hears a sound, the object that makes the sound is where the sound comes from. That may look relatively simple to parents, but not to infants.

Provide abundant auditory experience (the third month).

Supply your child with human voices, singing, music, sounds from toys, animal sounds, everyday sounds, such as running water from a tap, a doorbell ringing, and clapping hands, among others. Express delight in all the different sounds you hear.  The association of sounds with satisfying experiences prepares your child for his or her subsequent language and speech development.

Yes, you can start teaching and preparing your infant to read as he or she develops or grows up. Read my book to find out all the 29 steps to teach your child to read, beginning as early as in the infant stage.

Stephen Lau

How to Teach Your Child to Read

Most parents are keen on helping their children learn to read; and all teachers, who are responsible for the literacy of children, want their pupils to be able to read and write. Some children hardly need any reading lesson and they learn how to read before going to pre-school; others progress slowly but steadily; unfortunately, an alarming number of them remain illiterate all their lives. Whether or not children become early readers is not as important as that they eventually become proficient readers.

Teaching children to read is a fun thing, and one of the most rewarding experiences for parents. Look at the following 29 steps to see how I taught my daughter to read when she was only three-and-a-half-years old (that happened three decades ago, and now she is an attorney).

THE 29 SMART STEPS

STEP 1:   Developing Motor Abilities & Sensory Perception

STEP 2:   Initiating Imitation

STEP 3:   Developing Thinking

STEP 4:   Pointing at Things

STEP 5:   Developing Active Speech

STEP 6:   Familiarizing with the Orientation of Print

STEP 7:   Teaching Perception and Discrimination

STEP 8:   Teaching Visual/Perceptual Consistency

STEP 9:   Auditory, Visual Sequencing, and Memory Skills

STEP 10: Introducing Finger Painting

STEP 11: Beginning Writing Skill

STEP 12: Introducing Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies

STEP 13: Introducing Picture Story Books

STEP 14: Teaching Prediction

STEP 15: Teaching Word Recognition

STEP 16: Teaching the Alphabet

STEP 17: Teaching Pronunciation

STEP 18: Developing Independent Reading

STEP 19: Learning Sounds and Their Letters

STEP 20: Encouraging Printing

STEP 21: Lap Reading

STEP 22: Shared Reading

STEP 23: Paired Reading

STEP 24: Teaching Language Irregularities

STEP 25: Extending Sight Vocabulary

STEP 26: Encouraging the Use of Symbols

STEP 27: Exploring Different Modes of Discourse

STEP 28: Creating a Proper Writing Environment

STEP 29: Teaching the Sentence

See if the above 29 steps can help you teach your child to read. 

Stephen Lau

Essentials of Human Intelligence

If you want your baby to become smart, you have to understand what human intelligence is all about. Human intelligence includes certain key elements in the human brain: curiosity; creativity; self-control, verbal communication; and non-verbal communication.

Curiosity may kill a cat, but it will surely boost your baby’s brain cells. Your baby must show his desire to explore and experience new things through his sensory organs; his brain cells must be able to expect certain results based on his own observation; his brain must then test and evaluate his expectation before he stores his acquired and verified information in the database of his brain. This whole mental process increases his brain cells by preparing him mentally to ask questions, such as “what if” and “why not,” further down the road to intelligence. Arouse your baby’s curiosity to know more, and gratify his desire with more know-how.

Creativity is essential to intelligence in that it lets the mind think out of the preconditioned mindset to perceive new relationships between old things. It also involves a healthy dose of risk-taking, without which the mind may become static and uncreative.

Self-control or delayed self-gratification may also play a pivotal role in increasing intelligence over the long haul. Why? It is because distractions may be a stumbling block to learning; if your baby’s brain can stay on task and say “no” to any unproductive distractions, he can increase his intelligence.

Verbal communication skills play a pivotal role in the long-term development of intelligence. All babies have to learn the different sounds of the language they speak (phonemes), and understand the social implications of those words. Once the verbal skills of communication are acquired and mastered, learning in other areas will advance and accelerate Provide every opportunity to interact with your baby to teach him verbal skills to communicate with you.

Nonverbal communication skills are as important as, if not more important than, the verbal ones in assessing human intelligence. The explanation is that nonverbal skills require the mental capability to read the mind of another by looking at the behavior and facial expression of that individual. Babies love to look at human faces. Give your baby every opportunity to study your face to develop his own nonverbal communication skill. According to psychologist Paul Ekman, all humans use similar facial muscles to express their similar emotions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, that is, their body language.

All in all, intelligence is the capability of the mind to connect dots that are seemingly unconnected through creativity and imagination.

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Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau