One of the most important educational achievements that your child will ever need to gain is that ability to read well. This of course tends to start pretty young and it’s one of those things that most parents try to be quite hands-on about, as it is a really vital and necessary skill that will remain important throughout a child’s life. In this post, we are going to discuss in detail the importance of your child learning to read, as well as look at some ideas of how you can help to make their progress a lot quicker and more successful.
By the end of this article, you should have a much stronger idea of why reading is so important for your child, and what you need to do to help them learn to read a lot more effectively.
The Major Benefits Of Reading
Being able to read is obviously a central and very important life skill. But why is that? In general, having a strong reading ability is tied up with strong language skills more broadly, and that means that you can hope for your child to be a lot more intelligent in general as well. Reading also helps most people with their cognitive development and problem solving ability, and is generally a very important and good ‘brain exercise’ that everyone can benefit from.
Beyond those benefits, there is also the fact that reading keeps language skills developing at a healthy pace, which is itself a vital part of making sure that your child is developing well on the whole. It will help prepare them for the academic world, and their likelihood of real world academic success will be a lot higher. They’ll have increased concentration, a better ability for discipline, more imagination and creativity, and they’ll have developed an interest in something which can entertain them and sustain them, throughout their whole life, when they need something to turn to.
As you can see, there are so many amazing reasons you might want your child to be a good reader. But the question is: what can you do to make sure that they are learning to read at the rate you would hope, and achieving the kind of reading comprehension ability that you are ideally hoping for? Let’s take a look at some of the issues related to that question next, so you can start figuring out how best to help them learn to read well.
Developing Pre-Reading Skills
Before looking into helping your child to read, it’s important to be aware of some of the skills that have to ideally be in place beforehand, either because they are vital in being able to read or because they are otherwise important for setting the stage for reading, as it were. These pre-reading skills need to be developed as much as possible before your child can have any hope of learning to read properly and fully as a skill in its own right.
What kinds of skills are these? We’re talking about things like an awareness of the sounds in language and how they relate, otherwise known as phonological awareness. There is also the all-important skill of alphabet knowledge, without which no child is going to get very far in their reading ability. There is also an important skill called print awareness by some, to do with understanding different forms of text.
There are more than just these, but these are some of the most important to be aware of, and you might want to help your child develop these in some way or another if you want to make sure that you are doing all you can to help them with their reading journey. At the very least, it’s something you probably want to have some awareness around.
Reading To Your Child
One of the easiest and most important ways to help your child learn to read is to simply spend some time reading to them. This is something that most parents will feel called to do, and it’s likely that you are already doing it if you have a child. But it’s really important that you keep it up as best as you can, as it is truly an essential way of making sure that you are helping your child to learn to read, and to develop their language skills as you would hope them to.
When you are starting out with this, it is obviously going to be largely you just reading to them from basic children’s books, but over time this can develop as your child ages and their requirements change and alter too. By the time they are teens, it might be that you are still reading in one another’s presence, but that will obviously look very different as a situation to you reading to them.
All in all, reading to them is hugely fundamental in helping them to develop their language skills, and it’s something that you are going to want to make sure you are doing every day. Make it a normal part of the bedtime routine, and you should find that you are going to have a much better chance of helping them to develop their reading skills. You’ll also be able to enjoy a much closer relationship, as there is something about reading to your child that will always help to bring you together and make you closer to one another.
When you read to your child, finally, you should make sure that you are doing so slowly, and that you make it fun and interactive. If you are doing it in this way, rather than in a dry way, you’ll find that you are much more likely to enjoy it yourself, and that your kid is going to enjoy it more too, and ultimately that they will get a lot more out of it and find success with it. As such, this is a really important ingredient in reading to your child that you should be careful not to overlook.
Learning Difficulties
If your child happens to suffer from any learning difficulties, then this is something you are going to want to learn how to work with. The thing to bear in mind is that no learning difficulty is such an impediment that it is not worth trying to get them to read. Generally it is going to be possible to read, and you’ll just need to persist and learn how to help them as effectively as possible, which might be more challenging than with some other kids. All in all, however, it’s always possible, and you should make sure that you bear that in mind from the start.
It can be helpful to work out what their specific learning difficulty is, of course, and for that you might want to see a doctor to find out if there is something that you need to know about. If it is diagnosable in this way, that can be useful in helping you to work out how to help your child with their learning. If not, you can still help them, but it might be more a case of using your imagination and simply gently persisting with them as they try to learn to read.
All in all, you should be aware that learning difficulties, while causing some issues sometimes, are not always going to get in the way of your kid learning to read, so you should make sure that you don’t simply discount them because of having such trouble.
Encouragement & Writing
As well as all that, you should be aware of the huge importance of helping your child through encouragement. As with anything else in life, they are going to have a much easier time of learning to read if they are getting the right level of encouragement from you, so that is something that you should make sure you are focused on as best as you can be. As well as your encouragement, they’ll also need the encouragement of any teachers that they have, so that is something that you might want to think about when it comes to choosing their education – if that is an option where you live, that is.
The more that they are encouraged, the more they are empowered to learn to read. It should be clear by now that reading is an essential life skill which makes life so much more worthwhile, so it’s important that you are keeping this in mind when you think about encouraging them. As long as you are doing that, it’s going to help greatly.
Finally, a word on writing. As soon as possible, you should start encouraging your kid to write too, because this acts as a necessary corollary act with reading. In fact, they both go hand in hand very strongly, and it’s important that you are therefore doing all you need to in order to encourage them in both at once. If they are a good reader, they’ll be a good writer, and vice versa.
