How to Teach My Child to Read

The next step in the process is teaching your child to read on their own. Teaching a child to read can be a daunting task. Up to this point, reading has been a passive exercise for your child where they can enjoy someone else reading to them. Now they are going to be forced to be active participators. This can make some children afraid or angry.

Understanding your child's feelings is important. Validation is also important to helping your child feel comfortable taking those first steps toward reading. You can empathize with your child by explaining that you once had to learn to read as well when you were younger, and it wasn't easy for you as well. Acknowledge that it may be a little difficult, but that you know that your child can do it. Encouragement at this point means a lot to a young child!

Making reading an enjoyable and fun experience is one of the keys to reading success. You will keep them wanting more and encourage them to grow in their reading level. Many parents approach this in different areas. As stated before, providing encouragement to your child can make the experience more enjoyable. Knowing that mom or dad believes in them provides incentive to keep learning.

There are also wonderful reading incentives available through different businesses, libraries, and schools. Incentive programs provide a reward for children who read. Some of these programs provide free books or prizes when a child has read a certain number of books. This provides a positive reinforcer to keep reading more and more books. One of the best ways to get better at reading is to keep reading. The more practice your child has the better.

There are also what I called negative reinforcement programs. I do not believe in negative reinforcement as a way of getting children to learn new skills such as reading. I believe that children not only should be taught to read, but they should also should be taught to love reading. Really a love of reading is so important to later success. Why would we want to make them hate it then?

Some schools now use the Accelerated Reader program as a negative based program. They assign children letter grades based upon the score they receive on these tests. I think this is a terrible idea. You are turning it into a chore and something to potentially be feared by doing it this way. It used to be that children earned points based on there score that they could then use at the end of the year to purchase different prizes. This provided a positive incentive to read more books, understand the books, and earn more points as a result.