BLOG

Parent/Caretakers: The Best Way to Teach Your Child How To Read and Write.

Reading and Writing Teaching Strategies for Parents

Reading and Writing teaching strategies are important in improving your child’s overall academic process. Remember, reading and writing skills are not just natural processes that your kids can pick up on.

A parent must use the right approach to teach their children how to read and write. Patience is also key because you have to move with your child's learning pace. Most of these reading and writing teaching strategies are easy and straightforward if you know where and when to start.

Here, we go through the reading & writing teaching strategies parents can use at home. With these strategies you can coach your child, check progress, and boost performance in the two primary skills in learning.

Why You Should Study with Your Child

•  It helps build your relationship as a parent/caretaker of the child.

• It improves the child’s reading.

• It helps your child develop a reading culture.

• It boosts your child’s self-esteem.

It is essential to understand that in early grades, writing, reading, and spelling are learned. So teaching your child to become a better reader will require some formal lessons.

Reading and Writing Teaching Strategies to Coach Your Child.

The guide has two main parts. 1. Teaching Reading- a step-by-step guide on fundamental reading skills. a) Elementary Skills – these are the basic skills for beginners.

b.) Advanced skills- these are skills for advanced learners who have already mastered basic skills.

2. A guide on writing- here, we will discuss different ways of teaching your kid how to write.

It is also important to note that reading and writing teaching strategies need to work side by side to help the child learn better. Every exercise should take no more than 5 to 10 minutes for basic skills and not exceed 20 minutes for advanced skills.

You should also conduct learning in a silent environment and be very interactive with your child. Also, converting reading and writing into a habit will motivate your children to do the same thus, they will greatly improve these fundamental reading skills.

Moreover, using your Child’s School Curriculum as a guide to gauge the level of complexity of exercises you give at home will also help you stay relevant.

A Straightforward Guide on How to Teach Reading.

In order to teach your child to read, there are important aspects that you should be familiar with. Below are different aspects of language that makeup reading and writing. With proper assistance monitoring and practice, your child can understand and master all these crucial skills. Basic Skills

1. Print Awareness.

To know whether your child is 'print aware,' he/she should tell that some scribbling on a wall or page is written language. If they don’t, you can start introducing him/her by pointing at the signs and making sounds or reading what they mean.

2. Phonemic Awareness.

Here, you should find out if your child can notice, think of, and use individual sounds to make up some spoken words. If he /she cannot accomplish this task, practice with him/her on how to read simple three-letter words and help them understand how the sounds pair to make the word when spoken.

3. Phonics.

When you hear of phonics, it simply means if your child can tell the correlation of sounds and letters. As a parent/caretaker, you should ask yourself some of the following questions;

• Does your child understand the alphabetic principle?

• Does he/she grasp the concept that letters and different letter patterns stand for the sounds of words when spoken?

If you notice that your kid has a problem with phonics, you can remedy that by reciting the alphabets with your child. Help him/her learn that the letters make up the words, sounds, and eventually the language. Advanced Skills

1. Fluency.

As a parent, you will be concerned to know if your child can read text accurately, fast, and show the meaning of the words in the expression. If your child can accomplish all these his/her own, then he/she can now not only recognized words but also comprehend their meanings. In case your child is unable to do all the above exercises, doing regular practice will eventually lead to fluency.

2. Vocabulary.

On vocabulary, you will want to know whether your child can make sense of the words he/she hears, learns, or see in print and use the same words to make sense. When you notice your kid is poor in vocabulary, the best solution is to practice vocabulary progressively with your child, starting from the most straightforward noun (item) and (verb) words, stressing on what a word means.

After the child has learned a specific set of words, introduce him/her to the next set of words increasing the technicality this time.

3. Spelling.

In some cases, you might notice that your kid has grasped the words that you taught him/her but, at the same time, cannot spell them out well. If your child is in this position, you can easily help him/her understand that separate speech sounds (phonemes) make up words.

Another solution is by helping your kid understand that the individual or combinations of letters represent these sounds. The use of kindergarten rhymes or songs allows kids to be phonemic aware because they can hear the sound of the words as they sing, and they also find the activity fun.

4. Comprehension.

We read to comprehend. Good readers think actively during the reading process. As a parent/caretaker, you will be concerned to know if your child can use experiences and knowledge of the universal world, words, language structure, and reading skills to make sense of print.

If your child cannot comprehend words during/after reading, a recommendable solution is to read simple texts to your child and explain what each word means. Listen to them read and ask them what meaning they get from the reading.

How you can Help Your Children Read.

a) Talk a lot to your child, it will help grow his/her language and speed the learning process.

b) Always try to create time to read to your child, using correct sounds and pronunciations, and help them make sense out of what you read.

c) Encourage your child to tell you a “story” when you are sitting or washing them. It will assist you to gauge their level of understanding of the above skills.

d) Ask your child questions after reading a story. This way, you can easily tell if your words passed some information to your child.

A Step By Step Guide on Teaching Writing to a Child.

Writing skill comes second in the guide because a child's improvement in writing goes along with their development in reading. It is crucial to teach your child how to write because it is a complex task that will require a balance of aspects.

Some of these aspects are like the audience, ideas, topic, and the mechanics of writing, i.e., spelling, choice of words, and sentence structures.

How to Promote Writing in Your Child.

Because your child should learn how to read and write simultaneously, always make pencils part of your studies— even if the exercise is on reading.

Encourage your child to develop better writing skills by writing short notes or letters to him/her, and soon he/she will also be writing to you.

If the text is informational, have your child explain whatever it entails. Apart from sounding the words, reading should always involve progressive thinking and recall of events. This way, your child will be able to read, understand, and write more complex texts.

Practical Exercises to help Teach your kid writing and Spelling.

• Make word puzzles for your child by writing alphabets on hard paper and cutting out the letters. Use these letters to make wrong words and have your child place the letters correctly to form the right word. You may also choose to leave a blank space and have your child fill it with the correct alphabet.

• Correctly say a word you want your child to learn and have he /she repeat the word. Next, have the child write the letters he thinks makes the word.

• Mention to your kid that some group of words sound or spell the same. Talk of chop, crop, and top and ask the child why they are similar to pan, fun, man.

• Have your child look at a picture, write a sentence, and then have him/her read it out.

• Cultivate the old letter-writing culture in your child.

• As your child progresses, insist on correct spelling and meaning anytime they write down some words.

Conclusion

The above guide is a compilation of accepted reading and writing teaching strategies you can use to train your child at home. However, there’s no guarantee these exercises will produce your anticipated results when you want them.

Parents must be patient. Remember, your child will enjoy learning if you are fun and move with their pace.