Learning to read

Learning to Read: Early Reading Skills
Even before your child is able to sit down with you and read a book of his choice or yours, he's learning thebasic components of reading. When you go to the store and he recognizes brand names and signs of the shelf, he's learning to "read" the environmentalprint around him. When you sing silly songs, play rhyming games or read Dr. Seuss or nursery rhymes, he's practicing his phonemic awareness skills--thatis, he's learning to manipulate sounds.

Reading a favorite book until the pages wear thin helps your child learn core words, words he'll know bysight and will see over and over again in books. Plus, all that reading you do together will help him learn what reading should sound like, where toplace emphasis, how to change intonation and how to decode unfamiliar words by looking at all the clues.

Learning to Read: Creating a Fluent Reader:Once your child has begun to put the basic components of early reading together and has begun to recognize sounds, words, sentences and punctuation onthe page, you can rejoice. He's reading! The next step is to make sure he's able to read fluently, both orally and silently, fluent readers, those whodon't read word-by-word or stumble through the page by sounding out every word they see, gain more from reading. They are able to more easily comprehenda passage of text and transfer reading skills from one genre to another. They become stronger writers and often have (and use) a large vocabulary.