How To Teach Children To Read
Stephen Lau
Stephen Lau
About the Book
If you are here, you must be a caring parent who would want the best for your child or children. And you have come to the right place!
HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ is based on my own experience of teaching my daughter to read. The book was written more than twenty years ago. However, after years of research and revision, I recently decided to publish it so that I can share it with you.
HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ is a no-brainer: it does not require the use of a computer or an electronic gadget to teach children to read. With a little imagination, you can utilize your everyday interactions and fun time with your children to teach them a skill that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.
Let me tell you how and why it will work for you.
HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ, with more than 90 activities/games and over 50 illustrations, will show you in 29 steps how to teach children to read.
You will make teaching children to read a fun thing. Most of the activities/games are designed for one-on-one interactions with your child. However, they can all be easily adapted to teaching a group of children, such as in a classroom situation.
The 29 steps are simple, involving everyday activities and interactions that can readily reinforce the basic reading skill inculcated to children.
Did you know. . . . . .you could actually begin teaching basic reading skill to a one-month-old infant?
Don’t pass that opportunity!
Don’t wait till children are old enough to handle an electronic device, thinking by then that magic wand would turn them into reading geniuses. It won’t! You have to start them early at home, not at school, and you will be their first teacher.
Well, let me tell you my own experience. . . . . . .My daughter was a precocious reader: she was able to read around the age of three, and soon became a comfortable reader by the age of four.
Some parents asked me in disbelief if she was actually reading when they saw her, seemingly engrossed, holding a book in her hands. Like any proud parent, I told them she was reading. They were all amazed!
Once she started to read, a vista of knowledge began to open up to her, and she was consumed with curiosity about almost everything around her. That was a good sign for learning! She was well on her way to academic excellence.
Once she acquired her reading skill, she was very much on her own. As a matter of fact, I remember I “stopped” teaching her about a lot of things - she could easily find them in books.
Reading is the greatest gift - other than giving her life - I could bestow on her.
Equipped with that efficient reading tool, she naturally excelled academically. Learning was plain sailing for her throughout her academic years. She went to Williams College, the No.1 liberal arts college in the United States, and currently she is studying law in Washington D.C. What she has achieved academically to date has been in no small part due to her reading proficiency acquired at an early age.
Give children the best opportunity they can get. Of course, every individual is uniquely different in his or her development and progress: some are better and faster readers than others. But just do your best - give them a head start in life - and let God do the rest!
Well, what is so good about HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ? And what is the book all about?
Here is a detailed outline of the book:
THE INFANT STAGE
Step One
You will learn how to develop infants’ motor abilities and sensory perception, which form the foundation of their reading readiness.
You are shown all activities to develop their motor abilities, such as opening and closing the fist, the grasping reflex, as well as the deliberate and active grasping. These activities are designed to sharpen their visual perception and auditory experience, and to coordinate their hearing and sight.
Were you aware that . . . . . . infants do not easily connect what they see and hear simultaneously? That may look simple to you, but not to most children!
You have five activities/games to develop these basic skills - and you can begin as early as the first month.
Step Two
The ability to imitate is a prerequisite in language learning. All babies have that inborn ability . . . . . . But you need not only to induce their self-imitation but also to reinforce it by giving them appropriate feedback. There are two activities/games to help you initiate their imitation.
Step Three
Developing thinking is the key to learning and reading readiness in children. They should expect a certain effect which is the main motive for a specific action they take.
There are two activities/games to develop the relationship between cause and effect, and children’s lack of understanding of such subtle relationship is often an impediment to their learning to read.
Step Four
At about the eighth or ninth month, children begin to form an association between objects and words; that is, the meaning of words. You will learn how to use six activities/games to teach children passive speech.
Step Five
By the end of the first year, children should be able to understand simple sentences.
You will learn how to teach children active speech . . . . . . how to create active words from syllables they can already pronounce . . . . . how to induce articulation . . . . . . how to use “self-talk” and “parallel-talk.”
There are four activities/games to help you help them.
THE PRE-READING STAGE
Step Six
You will learn how to familiarize your children with the orientation of print: right-side-up, left-to-right, and top-to-bottom.
There are three activities/games to teach children these important concepts of print orientation.
Step Seven
Did you realize . . . . . . children may find it difficult to pick out letters from the background of a printed page - to some children, a page of print may be meaningless on a white page? . . . . . . many children may have a hard time distinguishing “b” from “d” or have confusion over “bin” and “pin”?
Here, you have six activities/games to teach children perception and discrimination.
Step Eight
Children must develop a sense of perceptual consistency so that they can recognize that a word in a different book or on a different page is still the very same word.
Again, that may look simple to you, but not to children! To help them develop perceptual consistency, there are two activities/games.
Step Nine
Sequencing and memory are important reading readiness skills children must acquire.
You will learn how to make children recognize that sounds and letters in words have a common sequence. For children to be able to read, they must not only understand auditory and visual sequences, but also remember them!
Playing memory games (one of my favorites with my daughter) is one of the two activities/games aimed at teaching children the sequence of things.
Step Ten
At the end of second year, introduce finger painting. There is one activity/game to make children aware that their scribbling does have a purpose.
Step Eleven
At the beginning of the third year, children should develop wrist and finger movement. You will learn how to help children achieve a satisfactory running hand and a correct writing posture, as well as develop their writing skill.
There are four activities/games to accomplish them.
Step Twelve
Rhyming is a natural way not only to categorize words that have sounds in common, but also to analyze speech units.
Did you know . . . . . . research shows that children with rhyming skill make better progress in reading and spelling than those without?
Here are six activities/games to introduce rhyming to children.
Step Thirteen
Introduce picture story books between the eighteenth and thirty-sixth months of children, whose thinking has become more complex in that they begin to be aware of happenings around them, over which they may have little or no control.
You will learn the many different ways of introducing picture story books to children and making them become interested.
There are two activities/games to do just that.
By now, you should have a general idea of what HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ can offer you in terms of teaching basic reading skill to children through activities and games.
NOW is the time to make a decision: Is the book suitable for you?
If you are a caring parent bent on teaching your child or children to read, this book is a must read!
Click below to download the e-book (in color) immediately for only $18.00.
If you would like to know more about the book, please continue . . . .
THE READING-READINESS STAGE
You will learn the different ways by which you may assess your children’s reading readiness: intellectual behavior; general ability; vocabulary and concept development; auditory and visual discrimination . . . . . .
Step Fourteen
You will learn how to teach children’s reading comprehension through prediction of sounds and syntactic units.
There are two activities/games to predict word sense.
Step Fifteen
Did you know . . . . . . learning a word is more than just a matter of getting the meaning from the sum of its letters or syllables: it is learning to recognize the word as a whole, just like one learns to recognize the overall appearance of a person?
You will learn how to teach children sight vocabulary, which forms the foundation of efficient reading.
Here, you have four activities/games to help word recognition.
Step Sixteen
Teach children the use of phonics, reinforced by four activities/games.
Step Seventeen
The ability to pronounce new words is one of the most important skills that have to be acquired by children in the process of learning to read. You will learn the two ways of teaching pronunciation.
There are three activities/games involved in teaching pronunciation.
THE READNG STAGE
Show children the purpose of reading . . . . . . teach them the experience of reading through sight, sound, touch and writing . . . . . help children with the strategy of acquainting the known with the unknown . . . . . . present them with reading materials which are logical and systematic.
Step Eighteen
Did you know . . . . . . independent reading involves many sub-skills? You will learn about those sub-skills, which are reinforced by three activities/games.
Step Nineteen
Teach children sounds and letters through three activities/games.
Step Twenty
To reinforce children’s learning letters for sounds, encourage children to print. Here, you have five activities/games teaching them to print.
Step Twenty One
You will learn how to interact with children in lap reading.
Step Twenty Two
Lap reading soon gives way to shared reading.
Step Twenty Three
You will learn how to do paired reading, which is learning to read reading, the ultimate objective of which is to lead to independent reading.
THE REINFORCEMENT STAGE
What are the basic reading skills children must have acquired before you can reinforce their reading abilities?
Step Twenty Four
To be proficient readers, children must learn language irregularities, such as compound words, and the alternate sounds for “c” and “g.” There are five activities/games to facilitate learning language irregularities.
Step Twenty Five
You will learn how to extend children’s sight vocabulary through two activities/games.
THE WRITING STAGE
Your teaching of reading should go beyond the decoding approaches. You will learn the four foundation skills of writing.
Step Twenty Six
Encourage children to use symbols in four different areas. What are they?
Step Twenty Seven
Teach children three major language use types with three activities/games.
Step Twenty Eight
You will learn how to create instructional settings and learning environments, aptly illustrated by two activities/games.
Step Twenty Nine
You will learn how to teach children the structure and characteristics of a sentence through seven activities/games.
If you wish to savor the book, you can read The Conclusion here:
THE CONCLUSION
So, it is not that difficult to teach children to read after all, is it?
Developing independence in reading is the goal of all reading instructions. Once children have acquired and mastered that skill, they can easily move from learning to read to reading to learn; and reading to learn is in fact studying. You can rest assured they are well on the way to full literacy.
To sum up, there are only two important factors that determine your success in teaching children to read: time and attitude.
It is important that you give children ample time in their early years. There is always time for reading. Unfortunately, the television can take away the time. In addition, early television watching instead of early book watching can affect children’s learning habits that might hinder their subsequent acquisition of reading skill, such as attention and concentration, eye movements and scanning, among others. Those television-addicted children often have a tendency to flicker through pages of a book just as they expect the pictures on the television to move quickly. Most recently, there has been a proposal to set up a television station catered especially to infants. It is small wonder that illiteracy in the United States is forever increasing.
Children as well as parents must have the right attitude to reading before they can learn competently. They must see reading as a self-rewarding activity. They must not only read what they have written or what their parents and teachers have read to them, but also learn to read by reading. Many children do not read books because they cannot read, and they cannot read because they do not read books.
Recently, Professor Anders Ericsson of Florida State University expounds that talent is overly overrated, and that expert performers are nearly always made, not born. And practice too does make perfect! These may be the clichés that parents are so fond of repeating to their children. Fortunately or unfortunately, these clichés just happen to be true. With practice, you, too, can make your children become expert readers.
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Rest assured, HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO READ is the book for you. Believe me, you will enjoy not just the book with its rich illustrations, but also you own unforgettable experience of putting into practice the twenty-nine steps of teaching children to read!
Click below to download immediately the colored 112-page e-book.
