Start Teaching Your Child to Read

Start Teaching Your Child to Read

It is important as a parent to teach your kid to read as early as possible. Don’t rely on the teacher. Start as early as possible, even during the first few months.

The ability to read holds the key to intelligence as it unlocks the door to a vast realm of human knowledge. There is, in fact, a very close connection between reading ability and intelligence, since children learn mostly by reading. In addition, the skill of reading, once acquired, will be used and enjoyed all their lives, just like swimming or cycling.

Therefore, reading is a human skill fundamental to academic and intellectual progress, and the failure of schools to teach all children to read efficiently has become an acute problem in education, especially in the United States. Illiteracy in America is still growing at an alarming rate. In fact, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey, about 42 million adult Americans cannot read, and another 50 million people whose reading skill is so poor that they can hardly be qualified as literates.

Unfortunately, the grim statistics have not changed much over the years despite the commendable efforts of schools. Illiteracy continues to be a critical problem, demanding enormous resources from local, state, and federal taxes, while arguments about how to teach children to read continue to rage within the education research community, on Capitol Hill, in business, and in the classroom.

Teaching children to read, however, should begin at home, and parents should be their first teachers.

29 Smart Steps to Teach Your Smart Kid to Read

This is a 117-page book on teaching children to read. It is the responsibility of parents, not the teachers, to teach children to read. There are 29 steps that begin as early as babies are only one-month old. These steps span over the infant stage, the pre-reading stage, the reading-readiness stage, the reading stage, the reading reinforcement stage, and the writing stage.

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

These steps with games and activities, as well as interactions with parents, will develop and enhance the basic reading skills necessary for ultimate reading proficiency.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau