As I mentioned in blog two, it is best to start with your child on short vowel sounds, which are the standard vowel sounds you hear in the middle of each of the following words: cat         bed         pig         sock         cup These short vowel sounds are predictable, and in all CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words the vowel in the middle (known as the medial vowel) makes…

It is important to keep in mind that reading comprehension is as vital a skill for children to learn as reading fluency. If your child can read words but then loses the meaning as they move across a page, reading will remain an arduous task and will not seem fun. Your child needs to be able to retain the information on a page and keep track of the story, and this can be difficult at…

As your child gets into kindergarten and then first grade, sight words will become a big part of their literacy skill set. Sight words are also known as high-frequency words, and are words that must be learned by repeated exposure because they usually cannot be decoded or sounded out. You can start introducing sight words to children early, and you’ve probably noticed that your child can “read” certain words already just by seeing them frequently,…

It is important to reinforce the skill of rhyming with your child as you move through their early learning-to-read process. You can work on rhyming before they have any letter recognition at all, just using objects around your home and asking whether they recognize if two things rhyme (for example, “Does hat rhyme with cat?”). Repeat the words several times to help encourage the recognition of the rhyme (“Cat, hat, they sound alike, right?”). This…

After your child is comfortable with at least half of their letter-sound relationships, you can move on to decoding and blending. Decoding is recognizing that each letter makes a specific sound, and blending is putting those sounds together to read the word. This is the process of reading that you are familiar with, also known as “sounding it out.” To decode a word, start with something simple, like mat. Point to the first letter and…

As I mentioned in the last blog post, your child does not have to have mastery of all letter names and shapes in order to move on to the next step, which is letter-sound relationships. It’s best to wait until they have an understanding that there are such things as letters, which have specific names and shapes, before adding the element of the sounds that they make, because this can be a lot for them…

If you are wondering how you can support your child’s early literacy skills, the best way to start is to remember that your child is born to learn how to read. Their brains are wired to absorb language from the sources all around them. The more you talk to them and read to them, the more they will naturally retain. But there are more active ways that you can provide them with opportunities and tools…