 Ways of Phonemic Awareness Development
1. Talk to your Child as Clear and Affirmative as Possible
The best thing is to talk to your child since the early childhood. There is no substitute for live human coordination.
2. Play Rhyming Games
Make up rhymes which coincide with your child’s name, or with the activity you are going to begin. For example, Joe, let's go for a walk in the snow. You may think over other rhymes of your own. Then encourage your child to continue using rhyming words further.
3. Make up Funny Words by Substituting Letters
"Apples and Bananas" is a great song for substituting vowel sounds and good exercises for your child.
4. Separate Certain Sounds in Words.
Make stress on the first and the second sound. Exaggerate the vowel sounds. Make it sound silly and then repeat it correctly.
5. Recite Nursery Rhymes with your child.
You can use a nursery rhyme any time for a diversion. For example, when you are dressing or changing a young child, a song or nursery rhyme stops the squirming and adds a bit of fun. Keep repeating the same text for some time and soon you will see that your child is repeating it after you.
How to Teach Your Child to Read
1. Teach the Sounds of the Letters Together with Their Names
Sounds of the letters are different from their names quite often. In reading, it is the sounds that count. Don’t judge strictly how the child pronounces the sounds, don’t criticize much.
Regional accents and getting used for some special language patterns make it hard for children to say most sounds in an academically correct manner. Accept a reasonable effort. Learning sounds is only preparing your child for a new big step – reading.
2. Learn Firstly Letters of the Lower Case
Capital letters take only 5 % of all the English language letters. Therefore, pay more attention to teaching the lower case letters. They are more important in developing child language skills.
3. Leave Grammar Alone on This Stage of Learning
Pre school educational establishments, including kindergartens and first graders are very concrete in the way they think and cannot handle complicated concepts and items. It is not necessary at this stage to teach them about consonants, vowels, long and short sounds and other grammar characteristics and peculiarities of language. Young children learn to read even without these rules.
4. Don’t miss Learning Writing during Learning How to Read
The process of learning how to read can be much more simplified if you teach your child to read at the same time. The motor memory of the letters, listening to their sounds and seeing them in writing will reinforce new learning. So, teach your child to write letters and words.
To really learn to read, your child needs the most important tool of all - the writing table - where you sit together and spend at least 10 minutes a day working slowly but gradually.
Choosing a Book
Books for children should be age appropriate and realistic. A book should be also predictable. Such books have some definite characteristics. Here are some of them:
1. They have a repetitive pattern.
Children can quickly follow and read along with the book after some first pages.
2. Such predictable books use some definite understandable concepts for children.
The children can easily identify with the story line and the characters.
3. The pictures and the text in book may have a good match.
That raises the book readability. The pictures that accompany the text essentially tell the story for the child after he has become familiar with the pattern.
4. Using rhyme and rhythm in increasing books predictability and utility.
Once the child catches the rhythm or the rhyming pattern, he develops his ability to predict the further actions.
5. Using a similar example of other story.
6. Stories that are familiar to a child also increase their predictability.
It is easy for most children to predict what the wolf will say in "The Three Little Pigs" because of their prior experiences with the story.
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