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| Kindermusik Home Materials include wonderful books to read together! |
1. Choose a book with a repeated line to read together. Encourage your child to say the refrain with you. Children will quickly memorize the story, which gives them a sense of mastery. When a child feels success, they are more eager to practice a new skill. This makes pretending to read through memorization an important pre-reading skill.
2. Answer your child's endless "why" questions. If she asks you something you don't know the answer to, look it up together. This teaches your children that reading is a gateway to knowledge and creates interest in written words.
3. Call attention to sounds made by different letters in an age-appropriate manner. For your baby, that may mean repeating the sound of a certain letter for her to repeat back to you. For your preschooler, you might play a game where you give your child a sound, "ssss," for example, and have him name as many words as he can think of that start with that sound. This increases phonemic awareness which will later help young readers sound out words.
4. When your child tells you a story, ask questions to clarify. This helps children understand how to tell a complete story, a skill which improves reading comprehension.
5. Read the pictures in your child's story books. Ignore the words completely and just talk about the story the pictures are telling. This serves several purposes. First, it helps children understand that things can be represented by symbols. A picture of a bear represents an actual bear, just as the word "bear" does. Second, it helps children understand the development of a story. Third, it teaches children that if they are having trouble identifying a word as an early reader, they can look to the pictures for a clue. This increases feelings of success when just beginning to read.
-Posted by Stacie Lopeman (a.k.a. Miss Stacie)
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