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Teach your child to read and retain sight words

This is Step 7 in my series 10 Most important simple steps to teach your child to read. In this step, I will give you some tips on how to teach your child to read and retain sight words.  These words are often called sight words or high frequency words.  I call them story words.  They are the words that a child needs to know to help them read stories. 

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Even the shortest and simplest stories are full of words like and, said, the, an, to, is, it.  But these can be difficult words for beginning readers.  These words do not always follow the letter sound rules.   

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Teach your child to read 3 letter words

In Step 6 of our series of posts on how to teach your child to read, parents will learn how to teach their child to sound out and read simple 3 letter words. This step will empower parents:  they will see and hear their child read words.

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First, make a list of simple 3 letter words that have a vowel in the middle and use the most common sound of each letter. Use simple words like cat, pet, lip, top, cup.  It is fun to make lists of words to use.  Parents can enlist their children to help think up simple, 3 letter words. 

Look around the house for inspiration.

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Help your child increase their awareness of details

Awareness of details in the world and people around them is an important skill for children learning to read. Find out how to help increase your child’s awareness of details by trying these simple tips.

Awareness and Reading

I am going to go off the path a bit here and talk about the importance of awareness. By awareness I mean attention to detail. This can be anything from using clues to help figure things out, the desire to figure things out, and the ability to figure things out. Awareness in reading involves things like noticing a certain line in a letter, being careful of which way to write a letter, or reading a word out loud and correcting it so that it matches an actual word in the English language. I notice the gap in awareness levels in my youngest students when they are in my classroom. I believe that awareness of details is very closely tied to reading. 

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Build the bridge between sounds and letters

This is Step 4 in our series of posts about how to teach your child to read. This step is perhaps the most important step. In this step parents will learn how to build the bridge between the sounds in words and the letters that represent those sounds.

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Use your letters!

In steps 1 and 2 of this series you introduced your child to sounds in words and to letters and the sounds they make. In Step 3, you used small objects like pennies to represent the sounds in words. And now you will use letters to represent their sounds in words. You and your child will land right on the doorstep of reading!

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