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Do You Know the Best Time to Teach Your Child to Read?

Does your child know how to read?

By Rose HesterPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
Do You Know the Best Time to Teach Your Child to Read?
Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

In the first years of life, children are very receptive. Many parents ask themselves when to teach their little ones to read, considering this process a real challenge.

Parents need to know that reading is not a very easy activity, such as speaking. Reading is acquired and to acquire this skill, intense exercise is the most important.

If before the children learned to read-only when they arrived on the school benches, in more modern times they can learn to read from the first year of kindergarten, and when they arrive at school the little ones should already know how to read.

This does not mean, however, that at school they will start studying novels or complex works. At school, too, teachers have the role of deepening the knowledge and skills that children have acquired in previous years.

For a child to become interested in reading and, most importantly, to learn to read, the role of parents is very important. Many of them believe that little ones can only learn to read if they see the text. But this conception is wrong.

The first step in teaching a child to read is for parents to communicate a lot with him and of course to read him stories. From the moment they are born, the little ones become receptive to the sounds that surround them and especially to the voice of their parents. The little ones love the sounds even before they know their graphic representation.

Even if at first the little ones go through a period of adjustment to the new environment and the new way of life, in just a few months they will be able to look at certain photos that their parents will describe; parents must associate the image with a word, and in this way, the little one will be able to name the object in the picture.

In this way, the little ones can also learn the alphabet, through attractive graphic representations that will increase their children's interest and with the help of parents who pronounce the letters clearly and correctly. To learn to read, children must learn to make the association between sound and word.

After learning the alphabet, light exercises are recommended. Parents can write the letters on colored cards, and the little ones will have to compose words. After this activity, the little ones can be made to write the letters, after which to write certain words. Research has shown that they will learn to read much faster if they learn to write at the same time.

By the age of three, the little ones hear a lot of sounds and words, and the result is that they learn to speak. From the age of three, children become more receptive to sounds, so they begin to make different associations and, more than that, develop their vocabulary.

Gradually they become more interested in their surroundings, wanting to know more about their living environment. Therefore, the answer to the question that gave the title of this article is that the ideal age at which children can learn to read is 4 years. This does not mean that before this age the little ones will not come into contact with any "reading".

To increase the little one's interest in reading and first of all, to facilitate the whole learning process, parents, grandparents or older siblings should read a lot to the little one. In this way, children will learn to articulate correctly the words they will hear repeatedly.

And when the little ones express themselves in a wrong way, the parents have to correct it; grammar rules are out of the question at such a young age.

Parents can make it a habit for their children to read. Sometimes the little one may feel bored and not give too much importance to "theory"; At this point, the parents should encourage them, trying to train them to read together.

What do we read?

A question that goes through the minds of many parents: what do we read to the little ones when we want to teach them to read too? Ideally, it should start with small poems with simple rhymes, because the little ones start to make associations between sounds and words much easier.

After that, you can opt for short stories that repeat many of the sentences. Many children love to read poems or stories of this kind, tending to memorize them very easily.

Of course, the role of the teacher is also important, because lately, the little ones have been learning the secrets of writing and reading since kindergarten. When the little one masters the secrets of reading quite well, he can choose his favorite books and stories.

Teaching a child to read is a very important step for both parents and the little one.

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