Teaching a child to start reading can be one of the trickiest things to do as a parent. This is because parents might don’t know when to start, like what is the right age to teach the kids how to read or also how to get started about it and what are the ways by which they can teach their child to read. Phonics is one of the basic and important things to teach a child who is just getting started with reading.
There are also many phonics activities and programs available and parents can take help from them if they like. One of them is the Children Learning Reading program by Jim Yang. It is a phonics based reading program for kids that can help parents to teach their child to read at home. You can also check parent’s children learning reading review, feedback and details about the program. If you are interested in a reading program, you can also check other reading programs and get the one you like the most by going through the programs details and information.
It is important that children know and recognize the sounds of the alphabets. Once it is done, following are some reading activities that parents can arrange and do at home for their kids.
Magnetic Alphabets
Magnetic alphabets are one of the fun ways of playing and learning the alphabets and their sounds together at the same time. As they are colorful, kids love them. This also enhances creativity and cognitive thinking in kids.
The activity is also good in a way that the child can actually feel and grab the letters in his hand and see the difference between different letters in terms of shapes and sounds. There are also a lot of activities with magnetic letters that parents can arrange for their kids. Some of them are matching letters, letter sequencing and word combinations.
Word and Alphabet Cards
You can either get these from the nearest bookstore or they can also be easily made at home, handwritten or printed. With the help of these cards, parents can also play some games with their children and playing and reading is a good combination for kids. With the alphabets and words, different things can also be made on the cards to teach kids their names/sounds or initial sounds of alphabets.
Word Puzzles
Different types of puzzles are also one of the great ways of learning for kids therefore parents can get different word puzzles for kids. This will also help in teaching children sounds, making combinations and completing words by adding the missing alphabets. Moreover, some other benefits of word puzzles are,
- They can help with spellings
- Good for working memory
- Enhances problem solving skills
- Also good for vocabulary
Puzzles also appeal to kids and these can also be considered as a good educational toy for them that can help in their learning. This also takes us to the next activity which is getting good educational toys.
Getting Educational Toys
Every child loves toys and why not use them in an efficient way. There are plenty of educational toys available that are designed and made in such a way to enhance reading and writing skills of children of very young ages.
Scrabble is also one of them but it may not be ideal and suitable for very small kids. There is also a reading table that has many interesting and good activities available. So children can sit and play on the table. Parents can also teach them and help them in doing those activities.
Letters and Sounds Matching
This is another activity that can be helpful in learning different letters and sounds. It is very simple and involves very little steps. Either parents can get this in different types of children books or arrangements can also be done at home.
An easy way to do this is to write some letters on one side and their sounds on the other side. Then parents can ask children to match the letter with its sound correctly. Once it is done, checking and corrections can be done. Repeating this activity can result in improvements with the passage of time.
Technology and Gadgets
We are living in a technology world with different types of gadgets around us all the time. These days even kids also love smartphones. Parents can download good reading applications and games for their children so that they can play and involve themselves in those activities. The good thing is they are interactive and children love them as they are also attractive. You can also check these kid’s educational apps.
Conclusion Focus should be on making the learning process fun, easy and attractive for kids so that they learn seamlessly. The activities shared above are some basic steps that can help parents in teaching their children how to initially start reading at home. Also, these are not the only activities, it’s just being more creative and thinking about other ideas of learning. If you are interested in more information about children reading, you can also visit Readwk.
