Before a child can learn to read, he or she must
first learn the alphabet letters, and know the sounds represented by the
letters. It's usually easier to teach some consonants and short vowels
first before moving on to more complicated things such as consonant
digraphs (2 consonants formed to produce one sound, such as "ch" or
"ph") and long vowels. As you can see, teaching children to read by the
phonics method helps them develop phonemic awareness, and it is also a
very logical and straight forward approach.
Start off by teaching your child the phonics
sounds. You can choose to teach your child in alphabetic order going
from A to Z, or you can teach several commonly used consonant sounds and
vowels, and go from there. For example, you may start teaching your
child /a/, /c/, and /t/ (slashes denote sound of the letters). Once your
child has learn to quickly recognize these letters and properly sound
out their sounds, you can then teach them to blend /c/, /a/, /t/ to make
the words "cat", or "tac", or "at".
As you introduce more letters and phonics sounds
in your lesson plans, you can generate more words, and slowly introduce
short, simple sentences to your reading lessons. Depending on the age of
your child, I would suggest keeping the phonics lessons relatively
short - around 5 to 10 minutes. Sometimes, just 3 to 5 minutes for a
short lesson is plenty, and you can easily teach these short phonics
lessons 2 or 3 times each day for a total of 10 to 15 minutes. Young
children tend to be forgetful, so repetition is very important.
You don't want to make the lessons too long and
boring, that the child begins to feel like doing a "chore" when learning
to read. So keep it short, fun, and interesting. By keeping the phonics
lessons short, you also avoid overwhelming the child with too much
information, and always remember to make sure your child has mastered
one lesson before moving on to new material. Confusion and uncertainty
will only make their learning effort difficult and frustrating - so
review often, move on to new material only after they've mastered the
current lessons.
So when can you start teaching phonics sounds and
lessons to children? Not everyone will agree with me on this, but I
believe that if your child can speak, then your child can learn to read.
Of course, every child is different and unique, and some children will
be more receptive to learning reading than others. One thing for
certain, is that the earlier a child learns to read, the better.
We have taught our 2 year old daughter to read
through teaching phonics sounds and lessons, and helping her develop
phonemic awareness. If you watched the video above, that is our daughter
reading randomly created sentences. We simply started teaching phonics
sounds to her by spending 5 to 10 minutes each day, spread between 2 to 3
separate lessons, and slowly introduced new letters and reading
material.
If you would like to learn more about the simple,
effective, step-by-step method of teaching phonics and phonemic
awareness, please click below.
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