How To Improve The Reading Skills Of Your Child

Guiding a child towards a love of reading begins early in life. Reading is knowledge, and that's a powerful skill to start them on the road to success. With a proper foundation, your child will love reading, and naturally strive to improve reading skills throughout their lives.

The process should begin long before your child enters school. So where do you start? Reading illustrated children's books to your toddler is key to developing a future reader, speller, and writer.Let's look at a few simple techniques and fun activities that are fun, while serving to improve reading skills.

Start with the small, heavy cardboard-paged books with simple words, letters and numbers. These books are good for two and three year old children, because they're colorful, easy for your child to hold, and practically indestructible!

To improve reading skills, try spending just fifteen minutes each day, with your child and one of these books. Point out the word, number or letter, helping them to make a connection between the picture and it's symbol. It's usually easy to find something humorous about the association of the two. This helps to keep things entertaining, and holds their attention. Don't force it. If your child gets bored, end the session. This way, they don't get turned off to the subject!

The traditional bedtime story, sitting side by side, is great fun and eases the transition to sleep. Your child develops familiarity and confidence of the connection between words as symbols of things in the world around them.

Kids may be so fascinated by one book, they'll ask that you read it again and again. Don't discourage them, because you'll find that the repetition soon has them reading, because they know all the words! Now you can start 'finding' certain words on a page. Let's say the story is about a kitty. Show your child the kitty's picture, then the word. Another step on the way to improve reading skills.

Introduce the concept of vowels, often a difficult idea for kids to grasp. You might  explain them as word connectors, consonants hooked to vowels like Lego toys. Once the child understands the relationship of vowels and consonants, they'll achieve a milestone on the 'improve reading skills' road.

Here's a great vowel game. On a single sheet of paper, draw a cute, simple face, with the mouth roughly in the shape of the vowel.  Show your child that making the sound of each vowel tends to look a lot like the symbol when written. You can sing the vowel, you can exaggerate your own depiction in a funny face, and encourage your child to do the same. Kids really enjoy this activity.
 
Do this with all the short vowel sounds. By the time your child enters first grade, they'll have a level of confidence that will make them eager students, being able to recognize vowels and words as symbols of the things around them.

By the time they are handed a spelling list, they'll know what it is!