     |
Developing Preschool Reading Skills
Get your kids hooked on books, develop preschool reading skills and ignite a love of literature, a desire to learn to read and enhance reading comprehension by reading with your kids.
In this article:
IntroductionThe ability to read is an essential skill for learning, and if a child loves reading, she will become more skilled at it. This lifeskill will give her an advantage: She will gain not only knowledge, but also pleasure from the literature that she is able to read. The converse is also true. A child who struggles to read, will struggle with conventional forms of learning and will always be frustrated when required to read. This could lead to all sorts of related problems which in turn may affect the child's self esteem and behaviour patterns. Of course you want to prevent that scenario, so where and when should a parent begin to develop preschool reading skills and teach their child to learn to read?
Reading with Babies and Toddlers
Even before she can speak, your little one can learn that reading is a time to cuddle up on your lap and spend precious moments together with you having fun and exploring the images in the books you share. "You are not reading a book to a child; You are sharing a book with a child." (Jay Heale) Babies learn by experience, so let the time you spend developing preschool reading skills become a touching, feeling, looking and listening experience. Obviously, you don't want your prize books to undergo the taste-test or get ripped apart, so keep them for use under supervision, but do let your child play freely with board books, cloth books and plastic bath books. As she grows older, she will realise that these things get paged from one side to another, that the images have to be the right-way up and that recognizable objects can be represented by two-dimensional images on a page. She may still be far from the maturity required to read, but she is already developing essential pre-reading or basic preschool reading skills! Your little tot will learn about reading even faster if she has good role models. If she sees you or other family members enjoying books, she will soon copy you when you sit down with one of those booky things! However, remember that initially a book will be just another thing to your child, so expect some damage and limit her contact with books to the sorts mentioned above, but do begin to teach her to handle them carefully and praise her for her efforts. Some types of books for developing preschool reading skills with little ones:
There are plenty of books that are aimed at just this naming stage - animal books, books about food, transport, alphabet picture books, baby's first picture book, etc. As your child's linguistic ability grows, begin to talk about the actions and events in the story books you read. Ask questions like, "What is (the character) doing?", "Where is she going?" and "What do you think is going to happen?" etc. Experts say that until the age of about 7 or 8 years, many children struggle to differentiate between fantasy and reality, between true stories and fiction, so choose the books you read to your children carefully. In fact, at age 5, one of my children asked me to stop reading The Wizard of Oz as he did not like the parts about the wicked witches. He found it too scary! From a young age, you should regularly read nursery rhymes and poetry to your children. Poems and rhyming verse will help to develop your child's listening skills as words are used to paint pictures. These are also preschool reading skills. There are many other
Benefits of Nursery Rhymes
.
As you and your child share more and more books and as your child matures, she will start to learn that you read a book from front to back, that you read the black and white 'thingies' that are printed on the pages, that you read from top to bottom and from left to right, that the printing is words and that the words convey pictures and meaning. They will also learn that stories have characters, action, a plot, a beginning, middle and an ending. By now your child should already be falling in love with and getting hooked on books!
Preschool Reading Skills
As your child matures and her preschool reading skills develop, you will be able to share books with more complex story lines. Picture books will still be favourites, but they will also enjoy appropriate chapter books that you read aloud. Busy books those books with pictures filled with dozens of characters and objects are also fun to encourage the children to talk about as are text free books, which require you or your child to make up the words and tell the story yourself. Since your child's concentration span will be increasing, she may also enjoy listening to stories on tape, especially when traveling in the car. By now, your child may begin to recognize letters and numbers and you may be tempted to begin actively teaching her preschool reading skills. Some children have been known to read as early as age 4, but these are the exceptions. Before you rush to give your child what you think is an advantage, be sure to read the book Better Late Than Early , which I strongly recommend, or at least my article based on their research and my own, Don't Start Too Early . And read the review of my preschool teaching manual, ABC Fun & 1-2-3 which will give age-appropriate learning activities that you can do with preschoolers to develop preschool reading skills. Picture books that my children have loved to read over and over:
Richard Scarry booksKalinzu and the Oxpeckers How it was with Dooms The Story about Ping Tabby the Wild Cat Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? A House for a Hermit Crab The Little House Mama, Papa and Baby Joe Fly, Eagle, Fly! Chapter books for reading with children: Grandma's Attic Search for them on Amazon or Kalahari, by using the links below:
Ready to Learn to Read"Kids need to see their parents reading, and they need to be read to themselves as early as possible. Young school-aged children benefit from responsive reading of stories with their parents. Such literacy-nurturing activities have been shown repeatedly to foster optimal language development." (Mel Levine, A Mind at a Time, p 148) There are probably plenty of websites or books available claiming to be able to test or tell you when your child is ready to learn to read, but if you have been reading with children since babyhood, she will already have been developing preschool reading skills for a long time already. As a mom I have noticed that my children are ready to learn formal reading when they themselves begin to show an interest in deciphering the letters they see around them or show an interest in writing. Usually one of the first words a child learns to read and write is her own name and this seems to me a more logical place to begin than at the beginning of the alphabet. This is why the first words in my manual ABC Fun & 1-2-3 are "Don't start at the beginning!" Once your child has become familiar with the alphabet and the sounds that letters make (rather than the names of the letters) she will be ready for more formalized phonics. A great resource for parents is Ruth Beechick's The Three R's. Even when your children have all learnt to read alone, you should continue to read aloud together. Not only does this reading with children enhance family relationships as you have a store of shared memories and stories read together, but reading aloud at any age also results in other benefits. If you're a homeschooling parent, or even if you aren't and you'd like to build a collection of quality story books for your children, consider investing in some great, age-appropriate children's literature from Sonlight Curriculum. Use the link below to see their fantastic online catalogue!
 Top of Preschool Reading Skills
The Benefits of Reading with Children
These were written by a homeschooling dad and educational expert, Leendert van Oostrum of the Pestalozzi Trust, the South African Homeschool Legal Defence Association in an email communication: " ...reading GOOD literature (of the kind you present in your programmes ) to children does much more ... a) It teaches them to focus and develops concentration. b) It develops auditory perception - to hear what is said. c) It builds their vocabulary. Almost all writers will use words that your family and friends do not. We have found that this helps a great deal when the children start reading - they read familiar words with much greater ease than strange ones. d) It develops their grammar, in similar manner. e) It gives them ideas to think about. Ideas are what the mind eats - "mind food", in other words. f) Due to the above, it develops their cognitive ability (i.e. it improves their IQ) In fact, there is evidence that it actually improves brain capacity - especially if you read in more than one language. g) It develops their imagination. Imagination is the ability to produce many scenarios from one set of facts. That is creativity. Creativity is the basis of effective problem solving. Effective problem solving is necessary for entrepreneurship and every other endeavour that can not (easily) be computerized. h) In conjunction with narration, it teaches the ability to distinguish the important ideas in a text from the less important and to place the important ideas in a logical sequence (analytic thought / logic). It teaches the ability to formulate and articulate their thoughts about those ideas (synthetic thinking / rhetoric)."
"For hours when children are lost in a book, you know they are in the best hands. They are wandering the riverbank or jungle, exploring Narnia or Dickens's London. Unlike television, that does their imagining for them, reading fills children's minds with faces and place they must picture for themselves. It enables them to create their own imaginary adventures, even to understand someone better, or see things differently." (Lesley Garner)
Click here for a list of online
Reading Games for Preschoolers
at www.kids-games-for-playing.com.
Top of Preschool Reading Skills
|
