Teaching Your Child to Read: 5 Tips

Reading is taught, not caught. This phrase has been in circulation for decades, but it bears repeating with each new generation of parents, and it has never been more fully supported by compelling evidence. Learning to read is a complex, unnatural, years-long odyssey, and parents should bear no illusions that their kids will pick it up merely by watching other people read or being surrounded by books. Parents are influential in helping kids navigate the twists and turns that lead to literacy. These five tips for teaching your child to read are from “Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six” by Maya Payne Smart.

1. It’s what you say and how you say it. Building literacy, like teaching of any kind, is about creating shared meaning between you and your child, and that requires meeting them where they are, capturing their attention, and engaging in back-and-forth exchanges. Parent responsiveness plays a major role, such as with how reliably and enthusiastically you respond to your child’s speech and actions.

2. Learning takes time and space. Ask any learning scientist about the relative merits of massing study together versus spreading it out over time. They’ll tell you that spacing between sessions boosts retention of the material. if you want your child to remember what you’re teaching, digging into it for ten minutes a day for three days likely will beat a half-hour deep dive. The spacing effect is one of the field of psychology’s most replicated findings.

3. The more personal the lesson, the better. Helping your child learn to read requires making decision after decision. Which letters or words to teach? Which song to sing or story to tell? When making the calls, err on the side of making the lessons themselves personally meaningful for your child. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as teaching the child the letters in their name first, making up songs and stories featuring their pets, or choosing vocabulary words from their favorite books.

4. Praise the process. One way to cultivate a can-do spirit is by cheering on their hard work, focus, and determination by name. Instead of giving generic praise like “You’re so smart,” say specifically what you loved about how they learned — not just the results. For example, if your little one is beginning to write letters: “Great job picking up the pencil and writing. I see you working to hold it in your grasp.” You’ll celebrate their work and lay the motivational track for other efforts to come.

5. When in doubt, look it up. Not sure what the answer to a question is? Look it up, and don’t be afraid to learn alongside your child. When it comes to teaching reading, be sure to stay curious and work to deepen content knowledge and awareness of different methodologies. For example, parents often do things like tell kids to sound out words like right, people, and sign that can’t be sounded out. These words clearly don’t feature direct letter-sound matches, but our default response to any decoding question, phonetic or not, is sound it out. The lesson a child needs in those instances isn’t how to blend this letter sound into that one, but how the English language and its writing system work overall.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services