How to Teach Reading—5 Simple Strategies

How to Start Teaching Reading:

Are you struggling with how to teach your child to read? You’re not alone! Teaching reading can be hard; it is hard to explain, and requires a lot of practice and patience. Luckily, with a little guidance reading can be easier to teach than it may seem. We have put together some of the best tips and tricks on how to get your student reading at grade level with just a few quick tweaks to your daily routine

Strategy #1: Read Daily

Reading and telling stories to your child teaches them sentence structure and how sounds relate to the words on the page. You don’t always need to read books. Try looking at picture books, singing rhymes and songs, or telling stories about your family. It is important to keep it fun! One amazing exercise is to sing songs with printed out lyrics, point to the words on the page as the recording plays, and overtime remove certain words and have the student write them in. Be sure to choose lyrics that are at your students grade level, and preferably, songs the students enjoy. 

Strategy #2: Master Phonetics

Reading requires a lot of practice and some memorization. This can be tough, because students tend to dislike it. However, it is necessary. Phonetics allows students to reason through words, so a student has to know which letters correspond to which sound. Start with individual letters then move on to blending i.e. consonant pairings like ‘th’ or ‘sh’. We recommend flashcards; be sure to track letters students are struggling with, and perform the drills daily until the students has mastered every letter A-Z.

Strategy #3: Work on Sight Words

Sight words are simple, high frequency, english words. The advantage of sight words is that a beginning reader will be able to identify the majority of words in a beginning text without having to phonetically reason through each word. This allows the child to concentrate on meaning and comprehension, without having to stop and decode every single word students eventually develop fluency as their reading becomes less punctuated by decoding. However, we do not want students to exclusively memorize words, nor do we want them to decode every word, so we strongly recommend doing this while simultaneously building phonetic reasoning skills.

https://sightwords.com/sight-words/dolch/

Strategy #4: Play Games

Like we said before, we want to make this fun for the student! Play sight word games on tablets, set up creative sight word games that let the student move around like the game ‘Word Walk’. There are a number of great games to play; one we highly recommend is the Sight Word Ninja on the iPad:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sight-words-ninja-slicing-game-to-learn-to-read/id821374885

Strategy #5: Make it Real

Point out words in the real world. For example, ask students what a ‘STOP’ sign says, or if you see any word that you’re working on at the grocery store ask your student to read the label or spell the item. Just like learning any new language students need to practice, and need to be immersed in it to truly understand it. Furthermore, we want to make sure students generalize the words to other environments, not just the school setting. Short frequent practice is best, and if students see the utility in reading they will become more motivated to learn.

Conclusion:

Learning reading can be hard, and can take a long time. Do not get discouraged if your student is struggling. However, keep in mind that a little structure can go along way. If you ever need help from professional reading instructors you can always give us a call to help you with your specific needs.