Some Tips For Developing Reading Skills In Your Child

Toddlers absorb everything around them. Without even knowing it, they sop up the skills that will help them become everyday readers, learning about and imitating sounds and letters and becoming aware of books and print that are part of their everyday lives. Parents can help foster these fledging bookworms by responding to their toddler’s efforts to communicate and boost their conversational skills early on. It’s one of the best ways to start them on the path to literacy.

Games help and parents need to find the ones that distinguish the individual sounds that make up words as a critical part in developing early reading skills. Marking syllables out by clapping along with names is a good method and there are even variations in more familiar traditional games like I Spy, where Mom or Dad asks their toddler to look for something that begins with a certain letter. You can get them to join in a familiar chant or refrain and then make some obvious mistakes they need to correct as another way to engage your toddler and help them build their reading skills.

Diagnostic Tool

These techniques can be more than games in some circumstances and experts in speech development can even use them as a diagnostic tool to recognize children with weaknesses in their phonemic awareness skills. These can be an early indicator of dyslexia.

Parents need to remember that toddlers are all about doing and action. As you already know if you’ve tried to get your child to sit still while you read to them, young children prefer to tumble and play. However, as much as it appears they’re not paying attention, your toddler is listening.
Choosing the right kind of reading material is important too. Picking books about animals and machines invites children to make sounds and pay attention. If the book itself has flaps, that’s all the better for toddlers to touch and interact with and parents can even start discussing simple reoccurring themes as another way of spiking their interest.

Shorter Attention Spans

You also need to keep in mind that toddlers often have shorter attention spans than babies so the reading sessions should be short and spaced out through the day. Your child will pick up more in these intervals than if you try to put them through longer more intense reading periods. Playing to their favorites is another way to keep them engaged and motivated about reading. When you find certain topics of fascination and return to these often, you’ll be building their attention span and their enthusiasm for reading at the same time.
Finally, even if your child is too young to identify with the books you’d like to read to them, it’s never too late to start laying a foundation that will later become a love of the printed word. Toys like building blocks with carved letters or magnetic alphabets are excellent ways to get your toddler started as a future bookworm.

Read more info like this at All My Children.
Author: Rob Starr