Teaching your child to read might feel like a daunting task.

Reading is something, as adults, we all seem to take for granted. It’s hard to conceive of a time when you weren’t able to read, mostly because it was so long ago. When you have a young child, however, your ability to teach them the basics of reading is going to come into play.

Today, we’re going to tell you how to teach your child to read. Whether or not you’re a good teacher doesn’t matter. Follow these tips and your kid will be picking up books before you know it.

When Should a Kid Start Reading?

Most parents will start trying to teach their kids to read around the age of 4 or 5, but of course, each child’s development is a little bit different. You might be wondering how you can aid your child’s ability to read at a young age.

The answer is quite simple; read to them. You can expose your child to the glorious world of literacy by reading them on a daily basis. From there, have them learn the difference between letters and how to blend the sounds of the letters together to make words.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules here, so whenever it feels right to start teaching your child to read, go for it. Making it a daily exercise will help them get where they need to be faster.

How to Teach Your Child to Read

How you go about teaching your child to read is ultimately up to you, as the parents, to decide. Here are a few quick tips to get you started, however.

Starting Out

After you’ve instilled the basics of sounding things out, teach them “sight words”, which are the short words that occur frequently in stories. After that, you can move on to digraphs (two letters that make a sound) and glued sounds (letters that come at the end of longer words).

Get More Books

Build yourself a library of the best books for 5 year olds, or however old your child is. Read to them daily and ask them questions to gauge how much they’re grasping.

Creating Additional Exercises

Using things like flashcards and matching games, you can get the repetition that your child really requires for word learning to stick. The more different ways that they can think about how to sound things out, the more it’ll be instilled in them.

Patience Is Key

As we said earlier, every child’s development is different and that rings especially true with reading. Some kids might take years to fully grasp simple reading concepts, but that doesn’t mean that you did a bad job. Similarly, some kids get a great start on reading but end up struggling with reading exercises in school.

You, the parents, just have to remain patient and give them fun daily exercises to work on each day.

Enjoy Reading With Your Child

If you want to learn how to teach your child to read, you have to show them that reading is fun. Even if you’re not a book lover yourself, you should enjoy reading with your child because it’s a skill they’ll have for the rest of their life.

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