The first step to teaching your child to read is really quite simple if you have the right equipment and understand exactly what your child needs to learn. These are skills that children should learn in their first year of school, however many children don’t achieve them for various reasons. The following are the very first skills that will set your child up for reading success:
1. Your child needs to be able to recognise the letters of the alphabet and say the short letter sound.
2.Your child needs to be able to blend the short letter to read 3 and 4 letter words.
Why begin with the short letter sound?
To begin with, teach your child the short letter sounds (the illustrations below begin with the short letter sound) rather than the letter name (which is what we say when reciting the alphabet). This is important because as you teach your child the letters, you should also be teaching them to blend the letter sounds to read three letter words. For example, “cat”, “sit” and “hot”. In fact, children only need to recognise three letters (“s”, “a” and “t”) and they can start blending the letter sound to read “sat”.
Your child can be reading words in just 25 days!
The School Start Buddy is specifically designed to teach these essential literacy skills. If you own a School Start Buddy, simply spend 10 minutes a day following the steps below with your child (scroll down to view a video explaining how to do the activity):