5 Techniques to Accelerate Your Child's Literacy

We live in an information society and literacy is the key to success in it. Being a good or excellent reader will be a huge advantage for your child over the coming years.

A young enthusiastic reader will get through 2-3 books every week. That might be 1000% more than your child is reading. And so a huge differential will open up.

So here are 5 things that will make a huge difference to your child's reading development. We employ all of them in our Easyread System:

TIP 1 - Don't Use Books

This may seem a bit crazy, but teaching a child to read with a book is a mistake. It's like teaching a child to catch a ball by playing basketball.

A bright child will look at the text and use the easiest approach, which is to memorise some words and guess the others. That seems to work OK at first, but leads to more and more guessing as the books get more complicated.

Eventually you will see a collapse of confidence at around 6 or 7 years old.

TIP 2 - "Dimensionalise" the Phonemes

Your child needs to be familiar with the 43 phonemes we use. They are the little sounds that make up each word. You can find a list of them in any dictionary.

But phonemes are non-physical, abstract objects and very hard for your child to remember. So what we do is create strong visual characters to represent each one. For instance, for the sounds of the letter A we have the ants in pink pants, the ape in a cape and the ark in the park. Those are things your child can visualise and so remember.

Our memories work mainly with visual images.

TIP 3 - Play These Games

We are avoiding books. So what else can you do?

Try these games, that work very well for us:

Build-A-Word. Take 6 plastic letters including 2 vowels. Revise the main sound of each one. Then say a simple 3 letter word that your child can built with these letters, like bed, dog, fat or mop.

Select-A-Word. On a piece of paper, write three similar words, like hot, hat, pat. Read one of them out loud and ask your child to select which word it is.

Nonsense Words. Using your plastic letters again, write a nonsense word, like leb, kib, teg, vod. Ask your child to try to read it.

Easyread-I-Spy. This is just like the classic "I spy with my little eye..." game, except that you use the first sound of the word rather than the first letter.

TIP 4 - Less is More

Never do more than 10-15 minutes of reading practice in one go. That is the most your child can do without losing concentration. Struggling on is counter-productive.

TIP 5 - Try Easyread TrainerText

TrainerText is how we let a child read unaided, while learning. The visual image for each phoneme in a word is floating above the text, so that the child can check if a word is unfamiliar. You can do the same with the images you have created in tip 2.

The great thing with TrainerText is that your child can work through the text without getting stuck and needing help. That is marvellous for developing confidence and self-esteem.

Using these techniques you will see a new confidence developing over just a few days. The children using Easyread are more enthusiastic from day 1 and have jumped forward in their reading within 3 weeks.

Article Source: http://www.aword2thewise.com

To find further information on How To Help Your Child Crack Literacy come to our site www.EasyreadSystem.com
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