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10 tips on early reading

Posted on June 02, 2014 by Lubica Misevski

 I saw a letter from Dr. Seuss to a primary school yesterday, and I thought his advice was brilliant. It read something like this “Dear Primary School, read, read, read, read, read, Sincerely Dr. Seuss.”

Dr. Seuss was truly a brilliant man, and a wonderful writer of children’s books. So his advice is well worth listening too, at least in our opinion. So this got me thinking, how can we teach our daughter to read, and acquire a love of books? Our little girl is only 3, and fortunately we have been able to achieve the first point by reading to her daily since birth. She loves to read books, and we are very pleased about this.

However, how do we move her from loving to read to reading, as she is not at school yet, and if we are to teach her how do we ensure we do this correctly?

So we gave this some thought, read some books ourselves, and searched for some good ideas. We thought there were some fantastic ideas and concepts out there, and wanted to share these with you today.

1. Share rhymes and songs, and encourage your child to join in

2. Point out letters, and words all around you and explain them

3. Stick the alphabet on a wall and go through each of the letters

4. Have them listen to the ABC song, one they like and sing it with them

5. Have them associate letters with characters, such as L is for Lion

6. Go to your local library and join the reading class

7. Make sure they have a bedtime story, in our daughters case we are now negating this down to 4

8. Repetition, reading the same books over and over is actually also very good

9. Let them choose books for themselves at the library or bookstore

10. When you are reading books over and over to them, stop midway through a favourite sentence and ask them what happens next?

So there you have it 10 quick tips, we hope they are useful and prompt some ideas of your own. Reading is truly a beautiful gift to give your little one, and one that they will be able to cherish forever.

Please let us know if you have any other great tips, or ideas that you would like to share?

Posted in Early child education, learning to read, zero to five