Parents, would you like to have a happy and successful child? Teach children to read

Is there anything a parent wants more than happiness and success for their child?

In the modern world, a key ingredient for a child’s happiness is his or her success in school. Nothing contributes more to that success than reading and writing skills. Here are three questions many parents have regarding teaching their children to read:

• Should Parents Give Their Children A Head Start In Learning To Read? The probability that a child will be successful in school is low if his reading skills are underdeveloped. Difficulties would accompany any reading deficits your child may have.
• Is hoping for the best enough, that is, is it risky to take a wait-and-see approach? Wouldn’t it make sense to take steps to ensure that your child can read at a level that allows them to focus on the many other demands of education?
• What is the best way to teach children to read?

This article addresses the last question. Interestingly and unexpectedly, there is a sometimes noisy debate over which of the two approaches to teaching a child to read is better: Phonics verses All language.

Phonics proponents believe that the best way to teach children to read is by giving them the ability to “pronounce” a written word and thus recognize it. They see the three letters of the word, cat, they know the sound that each letter makes and, therefore, they can discover, by putting the sounds together, that it is a word they know.

All language it is more difficult to describe. In essence, it focuses on meaning: giving meaning by reading; expressing meaning when writing. Defend the love of books, use “guided reading” and encourage the group to “read aloud.”

Fortunately, the debate is less heated than before, and few feel fully in one field or another. The most thoughtful compromise is a certain combination of the two methods: “Phonetics within full language.”

Long before any debate on Phonetics – Full Language, parents and teachers used a gentle and simple technique to teach children to read. It is still valid and even elegantly combines phonetics and full language. That technique is simply reading aloud to your child while pointing to each word. Marvelous. But it has two disadvantages:

• significant time cost, a problem for busy parents
• does not fully utilize your child’s natural curiosity, energy, and burning desire to learn

Internet to the rescue. Now, there are web-based systems that help even the youngest children learn to read on their own. By necessity, any computer-based system must focus on phonics-based instruction because full-language instruction requires a caring and patient person to impart meaning and convey the joy of reading.

So whether or not you choose web-based computerized assistance to help your child learn to read, there is still room, even in the modern world, for you, as a parent, to contribute, the old-fashioned way: read while. pointing out words and sharing meaning and joy at this exciting and crucial part of your child’s development.