Teaching Reading

Teaching Reading - What Could Be More Important?

At home and in the classroom, parents and teachers use a variety of methods and activities for teaching reading. These include phonics, oral reading, comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar.

Teaching reading in the classroom usually starts with lessons in phonics. Your child learns the relationship between a letter or a group of letters and a sound. Phonics helps your child develop the skills to sound out words. Phonics instruction can be started early, as children are fascinated by sounds. There are a number of books and kits used to teach phonics, and you may want to try these at home with a young child.

Oral reading helps a child develop fluency and confidence. As with any aspect of teaching reading, encouragement is essential. Reading aloud regularly in a supportive environment helps children overcome their shyness, and allows them to become enthusiastic about reading aloud in class. Ask your child to read to you every day. Help her sound out words and figure out meanings from context clues.

Teaching comprehension is integral to teaching reading. Teachers nurture reading comprehension through classroom discussions. They ask questions about content and elicit opinions from the children about a story. They encourage children to ask about words they don't know. You can help your child with comprehension by having discussions at home about what she is reading. Ask her questions about assignments and have her re-tell a story to you.

Teaching vocabulary is an important part of teaching reading, and learning new words is vital to progressing as a reader. Lessons on prefixes, suffixes, and roots will help your child recognize unfamiliar words when she sees them. Vocabulary should also be an important part of other lessons, like science and social studies. You can play word games and make puzzles for your child to help her learn new words. Talking to your child about her day, what she is reading, what's going on in the world, and what she is reading will also enrich her vocabulary.

Two types of grammar are important to young readers. When teaching reading, teachers help students understand the structure of sentences. When your child knows sentence patterns, she can often figure out unfamiliar words by their placement. Your child will also learn story grammar, which is the structure of a piece of writing. Teaching children how language works and how stories and other pieces of writing are structured is an important part of teaching reading.