How does our child learn to read !

Learning to read can start as early as 9 months old!  You don't believe me, watch this:
Your Baby Can Read Program !

Also now in schools in the UK, Australia, USA & Canada, the lattest proven method of teaching kids to read and to write is based on the below mentioned process of a child's early learning of reading & writing. It can be used starting 2-6 years of age.
Jolly Phonics !


In order to understand how these programs work, we need to understand how a child learns to read:

The Beginning Roots:
•Children begin to learn to read before they are even able to recognize a single letter. Throughout the first few years of life, children are exposed to sounds and rhythms in speech. These patterns help them develop an understanding of how words are formed and the individual sounds that compose the words.

Language and Literature's Role

•Exposure to language and literature is essential for a child to learn to read. As an infant and toddler, a child integrates the sound patterns in words and starts to develop phonemic awareness---an understanding of letter sounds and how they fit together in words. From the earliest ages, children learn that certain words rhyme and that there are rhythms to language.

Learning Phonics

•As children finish kindergarten and move into the first stages of learning to read, they starts to recognize individual letters and the sounds they make. When exposed to written letters, children start to associate the appearance of the letter with the sounds with which they have become familiar. This process is the natural continuation of the earlier phonemic awareness. Phonics---the relationship between letters and the sounds they make---is the cornerstone of learning to read. Children first learn to correlate the appearance of a letter with the sound it most commonly makes, then move on to combinations of letters to form patterns of sound.

Decoding

•Once phonemic awareness is solidly in place, children learn to decode words more quickly upon seeing the letter patterns. This ability to visually connect the letters and combinations is called "the alphabet principle." Practices that help a child learn to read include repeating rhyming words and breaking down the words into "taps"---one tap for each syllable. Also try repetitive visualization and pronunciation of common letter combinations such as "sh," "ch" and "st."

Sight Reading

•After children can reliably phonetically sound out basic words that follow the rules of pronunciation, they begin to work on sight reading. Some words in language cannot be phonetically read and the child must learn to read them simply by looking at the word as a whole. Sight reading is a process of memorization.

Maximizing Reading Potential

•To optimize children's ability to learn to read, provide early and frequent exposure to written language. This process is ideally begun before kindergarten. By that stage, the child should have a solid foundation for beginning to learn to read.



Want to know more about those two programs and how to apply them at home if you want!
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