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By Teaching Resource Center | 1 Comment
Early reading is a critical skill you can help kids learn by reading out loud, storytelling and teaching them the sounds of the alphabet letters.
Perhaps no early learning skill is more important than reading. Kids’ self esteem and sense of accomplishment from learning to read is a key milestone in early childhood development!
There has been plenty written about how important it is to read to children beginning at an early age, storytelling, and games involving rhyming. Learning to read also becomes much easier when parents and teachers help kids associate letter sounds with letter names.
Typical learning activities to help kids learn letter sounds can include pointing to magnetic letters on a white board or refrigerator, etc. and helping them identify the letters by the related sounds each letter makes.
Reading begins with learning the alphabet, which can be greatly accelerated by tools like The Spelling List Magnetic Letter Set, Beginning Sound Sort Cards and Quercetti Magnetic Letters.
Every primary school teacher knows that vowels are the hardest letter sounds for kids to learn since the sounds vary with the usage of each vowel. You can start by working with short sounds like "a" as in "sat" instead of the letter name "a" as in "name", the short sound "e" as in "fed" instead of the long letter sound "e" as in "read", etc.
It is amazing to hear a kindergarten-age child sounding out various letters as they tackle this extremely difficult milestone of learning the various sounds of each letter in the alphabet.
Once your child has learned the alphabet, they are ready to begin learning how to connect 2 or 2 letters together to form simple words. Word sort games and activities are critical at this stage in the process of learning to read. Our Basic Literacy Kit includes all the tools needed in your early literacy learning center, including magnetic lapboards, alphabet letters, letter tiles, magnetic sight words and much more.
Click on any of the topics in our Reading section to find hundreds of great ideas, tools, tips and guides on how to teach kids early reading skills!
Carol Brooke
- Jun 3rd, 09
Learning concepts about print (front of book, back of book, up to down and left to right) are all crucial concepts that can even be mastered by a toddler! Until I had my own little girl I did not realize that reading every single day makes a huge impact. We also practice the alphabet. I was a kindergarten teacher, so I have experience teaching children how to read. I was astonished recently when my 26 month old daughter pointed to a Wells Fargo sign and said “O! Mommy! O!” She loves to point to signs and she can identify the letters “o” and “e”. It truly is amazing. I noticed that it also helps her to re-tell the story by doing her own picture walk. In her own baby talk (which I don’t always understand). I let her turn the pages and she actually starts to say words I have not heard her say before. Letting her lead me through picture walks gives her the opportunity to expand her vocabulary.