5 Techniques to Accelerate Your Child's Literacy

To thrive at school and then develop the best possible career, your child needs to be an excellent reader. Just being able to read is not enough.

A young enthusiastic reader will get through 2-3 books every week. That might be 1000% more than your child is reading. And so a huge differential will open up.

So here are 5 things that will make a huge difference to your child's reading development. We employ all of them in our Easyread System:

TIP 1 - Avoid Early Reading Books

This may seem a bit crazy, but teaching a child to read with a book is a mistake. It's like teaching a child to catch a ball by playing basketball.

A bright child will look at the text and use the easiest approach, which is to memorise some words and guess the others. That seems to work OK at first, but leads to more and more guessing as the books get more complicated.

Eventually you will see a collapse of confidence at around 6 or 7 years old.

TIP 2 - "Dimensionalise" the Phonemes

We use 43 phonemes (the little sounds within words) to create every word in English. You can find them at the beginning of any dictionary. Your child needs to know them, to make learning to read easier.

But phonemes are non-physical, abstract objects and very hard for your child to remember. So what we do is create strong visual characters to represent each one. For instance, for the sounds of the letter A we have the ants in pink pants, the ape in a cape and the ark in the park. Those are things your child can visualise and so remember.

The majority of your child's memory capacity is visual.

TIP 3 - Play These Games

You don't want to start with a book. So where do you start?

We find games like these work well:

Build-A-Word. Take 6 plastic letters including 2 vowels. Revise the main sound of each one. Then say a simple 3 letter word that your child can built with these letters, like bed, dog, fat or mop.

Selec-A-Word. This is a simple reading exercise. Write three similar words on a piece of paper, like ten, pen, pin. Then read one of them out and ask your child to select it.

Nonsense Words. Take some plastic letters again, revise their sounds and write a word that makes no sense, like hab, fud, tem, wom. Then see if your child can read it.

Easyread-I-Spy. Play the classic "I spy with my little eye..." game. But instead of using the first letter of the name of the object, use the first sound instead.

TIP 4 - Less is More

Never do more than 10-15 minutes of reading practice in one go. That is the most your child can do without losing concentration. Struggling on is counter-productive.

TIP 5 - Try Easyread TrainerText

TrainerText is a system we use to make ongoing reading practise much easier for the child. We float the visual images that we have created for each phoneme above the text, so that there is a clue to the sounds in each word. You can use the images you have created for Tip 2 to do the same.

The great thing with TrainerText is that your child can work through the text without getting stuck and needing help. That is marvellous for developing confidence and self-esteem.

We see a new level of enthusiasm from day 1 and a leap in confidence over the first 3 weeks using these techniques. If you employ them, I am sure you will quickly see the difference.

Article Source: http://insightpros.com

To get further information on How To Help Your Kids Learn To Read visit our site www.EasyreadSystem.com
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