Are you worried because your child is unable to identify or read words yet?

Here are the five reading strategies that will help your child improve:

1. Introduce your child to the world of Phonics. Phonics is a method of teaching reading, which focuses on the letter sounds of each alphabet. Knowing the sounds of the alphabets is a good foundation towards learning how to read or decode words.
2. Teach segmentation and blending. Segmentation is the breaking down of a word into individual sounds. For example, when you present the word “cat” to your child, he/she should be able to break it into its individual sounds like /c/, /a/, /t/. After breaking it into sounds, he/she may blend the sounds like /c/… /at/… /cat/.
3. Teach high frequency words. High frequency words are those words that are often present in reading text such as he, she, me, we, the, a, an, etc. It needs to be memorized as it does not follow the sound rule of Phonics.
4. Introduce storybooks with simple sentences. Let your child read a simple storybook with one or two sentences. Alternatively, you may create your own sentence combining simple words and high frequency words (e.g. The cat is on the mat). You have to observe how the child is reading it. If he/she is trying to blend the sounds in “cat” and “mat”, that means that he/she has acquired the skill in decoding words. That is a success to you since surely he/she will become an independent reader soon!
5. Challenge your child’s reading ability. So now, you think your child is able to decode words? Challenge your child by allowing him/her to read books with different level of difficulty.

If you want to know teaching strategies on improving your child’s spelling skills, you may read my previous post.