Kids start the process of learning to read right from birth! According to the American Library Association, here are things you can do at home every day to help your child grow into a strong reader:
• Talk about things so your children know the names of things. This builds a child’s vocabulary.
• Describe things and tell stories. This helps kids build narrative skills.
• Help your kids get interested in books by cuddling with them and reading. This makes them want to become readers and is called print motivation.
• Make sure your children know the alphabet, what the different letters look like, and the sounds of the letters in the alphabet. This is called letter knowledge.
• Let your child play with books. Let them hold books and pretend to read them and look at the words on the page even if they don’t know what they mean yet. This helps them understand how the printed word works, and it's called print awareness.
• Play with words by rhyming or sounding them out. This helps kids hear the smaller sounds that make up words and is called phonological awareness.
At different ages, kids need different things to help them become readers.
• Babies and toddlers
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• Two and three year olds (.pdf)
• Four and five year olds (.pdf)
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