How to teach a child to read: important rules and effective techniques

How to know when it's time: signs of psychological readiness

The child speaks fluently in sentences and understands the meaning of what was said.
The child distinguishes between sounds (what speech therapists call developed phonemic hearing). Simply put, the kid will easily understand by ear where the house and the bow are, and where the tom and the hatch are.
Your child pronounces all sounds and has no speech therapy problems.
The child understands the directions: left-right, up-down. Let's omit the point that adults often confuse left and right. For learning to read, it is important that the baby can follow the text from left to right and from top to bottom.

8 rules to teach your child to read

Lead by example

In a family where there is a culture and tradition of reading, children themselves will be drawn to books. Read not because it is necessary and useful, but because it is for your pleasure.

Read together and discuss

You read aloud and then look at the picture together, encouraging the child to interact with the book: “Who is this drawn? Show the cat's ears? And who is this standing next to her? " Older children can be asked more difficult questions: “Why did he do this? What do you think will happen next?"

Go from simple to complex

Start with sounds, then move on to syllables. Let the first words be the words consisting of repeating syllables: ma-ma, pa-pa, dya-dya, nya-nya. After them, move on to more complex combinations: to-t, zhu-k, to-m.

Show that letters are everywhere

Play the game. Let the child find the letters that surround him on the street and at home. These are the names of stores, and information boards, and even traffic light messages: it happens that the inscription “Go” lights up on green, and “Wait so many seconds” on red.

Play

Play again. Fold cubes with letters and syllables, make up words, ask your child to read you some sign or inscription on the packaging in the store.

Use every opportunity to train

Whether you are sitting in line at the clinic or driving somewhere, take out a book with pictures and short stories to them and invite your child to read together.

Build on success

Repeat familiar texts, look for already famous heroes in new stories. The runaway hare can be found both in Teremka and Kolobok.

Do not force

This is perhaps the most important thing. Do not take away from the child his childhood. Learning should not go through violence and tears.

6 time-tested techniques

ABCs and primers

How to teach a child to read: important rules and effective techniques

Traditional, but the longest way. The difference between these books is that the alphabet fixes each letter with a mnemonic picture: a drum will be drawn on page B, and a yula will be drawn next to Yu. The alphabet helps to remember letters and - often - interesting rhymes, but it will not teach you how to read.

The primer sequentially teaches the child to combine sounds into syllables, and syllables into words. This process is not easy and requires perseverance.

There are quite a lot of author's primers now. According to the books of Nadezhda Betenkova, Vseslav Goretsky, Dmitry Fonin, Natalia Pavlova, children can study both with their parents before school and in the first grade.

Parents agree that one of the most understandable methods for teaching preschoolers is Nadezhda Zhukova's primer. The author simply explains the most difficult thing for a child: how to turn letters into syllables, how to read ma-ma, and not start naming individual letters me-a-me-a.

Zaitsev Cubes

If, while learning from the primer, the child sequentially masters letters and syllables, then in 52 Zaitsev cubes he is given access to everything at once: a single letter or combinations of a consonant and vowel, a consonant and a hard or soft sign.

The child effortlessly learns the differences between voiceless and voiced sounds, because cubes with voiceless consonants are filled with pieces of wood, and cubes with voiced consonants are filled with metal.

The cubes also differ in size. The large ones depict solid warehouses, the small ones - soft ones. The author of the technique explains this by the fact that when we say on (hard warehouse), the mouth opens wide, nor (soft warehouse) - lips in a half smile.

The set includes tables with warehouses, which the parent sings (yes, does not speak, but sings) to his child.

The child quickly masters warehouse reading with the help of cubes, but may begin to swallow endings and will face difficulties already at school when parsing a word in composition.

"Warehouses" and "Teremki" by Vyacheslav Voskobovich

How to teach a child to read: "Warehouses" by Vyacheslav Voskobovich

In Skladushki, Vyacheslav Voskobovich reworked Zaitsev's idea: on 21 cards, all the warehouses of the Russian language are presented with pretty thematic pictures. The set includes a CD with songs, the lyrics of which go under each picture.

The folds are well suited for children who like to look at pictures. Each of them is an occasion to discuss with the child where the kitten is, what the puppy is doing, where the beetle flew.

You can teach a child using these cards from the age of three. It should be noted that the author of the technique does not consider it necessary to force early development.

How to teach a child to read: "Teremki" by Vyacheslav Voskobovich

Voskobovich's "Teremki" consists of 12 wooden cubes with consonants and 12 cardboard cubes with vowels. First, the child gets acquainted with the alphabet and, with the help of the parents, tries to come up with words that begin with each of the letters.

Then it's time to learn the syllables. A is inserted into the tower with the letter M - and the first syllable is obtained. You can put words out of several houses. Learning is based on the game. So, when the vowel is replaced, the house will turn into smoke.

You can start playing teremki from the age of two. At the same time, parents will not be left alone with the cubes: the set includes a manual with a detailed description of the methodology and options for games.

Dynamic Chaplygin cubes

Evgeny Chaplygin's manual includes 10 cubes and 10 movable blocks. Each dynamic block consists of a consonant and vowel pair. The child's task is to spin the cubes and find a pair.

At the initial stage, as with any other method of teaching reading in warehouses, the child makes up the simplest words from repeating syllables: ma-ma, pa-pa, ba-ba. The involved motor skills help to quickly memorize the outline of the letters, and the search for already familiar syllables turns into an exciting game. A manual is attached to the cubes with a description of the technique and words that can be composed.

The optimal age for training is 4–5 years. You can start earlier, but only in a game format.

Doman cards

How to teach a child to read: Doman's Cards

American physician Glenn Doman suggests teaching children not individual letters or even syllables, but whole words. Parents name and show the child the words on the cards for 1-2 seconds. At the same time, the baby is not required to repeat what he heard.

Classes begin with 15 cards with the simplest concepts like mom and dad. Gradually, the number of words increases, the already learned ones leave the set, and the child begins to learn phrases: for example, color + object, size + object.

How to understand that the child understood and remembered the visual image of the word, if the author of the method recommends starting classes from birth? It is worth paying attention to an important detail that parents overlook in an attempt to make the child the smartest, most developed, the most-most.

Glenn Doman in "Harmonious Development of the Child" strongly emphasizes that there is no need to arrange tests and examinations for the child: kids do not like this and lose interest in classes.

Better to remember 50 cards out of 100 than 10 out of 10.

Glenn Doman

But given that parents cannot help but check, he advises, if the child wants and is ready to play a game. For example, you can put several cards and ask to bring one or point to it.

Today psychologists, neurophysiologists and pediatricians agree that Doman's method is aimed not at teaching reading, but at mechanically memorizing visual images of words. The child turns out to be an object of learning and is almost deprived of the opportunity to learn something on his own.

It is also worth adding: to proceed to the stage of reading according to Doman, parents need to prepare cards with all (!) Words that are found in a particular book.

6. Reading in Montessori

How to teach a child to read: Reading Montessori

Reading in Montessori goes from the opposite: first we write and only then we read. Letters are the same pictures, so first you need to learn how to draw them and only then practice pronunciation and reading. Children start out by tracing and shading letters, so they memorize their style. When several vowels and consonants have been studied, they move on to the first simple words.

Much attention is paid to the tactile component, so children can literally touch the alphabet, cut out of rough or velvety paper.

The value of the methodology lies in learning through play. So, you can put a rough letter and a plate with semolina in front of the child and suggest that you first circle the sign with your finger, and then repeat this on the semolina.

Difficulty for parents - buying or preparing a significant amount of handouts.

conclusions

On the Internet and on posters advertising "development", you will be offered ultra-modern methods of teaching a child to read at three, two years of age, or even from birth. But let's be realistic: a happy mother is needed a year, not developmental activities.

The myth that it's too late after three is firmly embedded in the minds and hearts of tired parents and is actively fueled by marketers.

The authors of the methods all as one insist that the most natural process of learning for a child is through play, and not through classes in which the parent plays the role of a strict controller. Your main assistant in learning is the curiosity of the child himself.

Some children will study for six months and start reading at three, others need to wait a couple of years to learn in just a month. Start from the interests of the child. If he likes books and pictures, primers and "Warehouses" will come to the rescue. If he is a fidget, then cubes and the Montessori system will help.

Learning to read is simple and complex at the same time. If your child often sees you with a book, you have developed a tradition of reading before bedtime, your chances of getting your child interested in reading will increase significantly.

Tell us in the comments how you teach to read and what favorite books your children have.