Reading and Literacy

Teaching programs help children to learn to read, and parents can help at home.

Schools are constantly searching for the best teaching program in order to teach children to read, the fundamentally most important part of early education.

The best and most efficient method of teaching reading to young children has been uppermost in the minds of parents, teachers and other members of the education profession alike for many years. Much research has been done by schools and teachers into what actually makes a good reader, and how they essential decode the information on the page and recognize the signs as meaningful words. There have been various different teaching programs developed for schools over the years, and it is interesting to see the differences between them, and how teaching programs help children to learn to read.

All Children are Different

It is important to remember, when thinking about how teaching programs help children that all children do not learn in the same way and education professionals have come to recognize that fact. Some children have excellent photographic type memories and find learning to read at school a relatively simple process, some have difficulty remembering letters and need more phonetic help, learning the sounds of letters, and importantly, groups of letters, in order to learn to read, and many schools have recognized this and offer special education programs for children who find it difficult to learn to read in a classroom environment and benefit from ‘one to one’ or small group teaching programs.

Teaching Children using Phonograms

It has been found that strong readers have the ability to decode any new words which they come across by comparing them to words which are already familiar to them, rather than by looking at each individual letter. Recognizing these spelling patterns and spelling sounds is thought to be the main difference between a strong reader and a child who finds learning to read more difficult. A phonogram is a chunk of letters, often referred to children as ‘word families’ and by learning to recognize these their reading skills can improve faster, both at school and at home.

Any words which contain the same phonogram, or chunk of letters, can be recognized much easier, for example, chair, hair, fair, all contain the same word family ‘air’ and once the child learns to recognize this and decode it, the other words become much more easily recognizable, even if they have never seen them before. In effect, the child only has to decode the beginning of the word, not every letter. This is the major reason why children or adults who suffer from dyslexia, however mild, often have trouble when learning to read and spell, as these letter patterns are not clear to them and need more specific strategies to help them to learn to read.

Using School Reading Strategies at Home

There are many things which parents can do to help their children to learn to read and some easy techniques which follow on from school with the phonogram, or word family philosophy. One good idea is to have your child draw or color a picture of one item, let’s say for example, a ball, and then to ‘brainstorm’ together and try to think of as many other words as possible which belong to the same word family – hall, tall, fall, and write them on the paper. You can then build up a booklet or file with all of the word families which your child should recognize, and use it to continue with your child’s reading strategies at home.

There is really only one way to improve the reading of your child, and that is to read, read, and read some more.