How children learn to read

Is the development and education of your child important to you? And have you been searching for a program that will help you teach your child to read, but spending hundreds of dollars on unproven programs just doesn't make any sense to you? I can understand your frustrations, as I've been through much of the same experiences myself...

Recently I came across a step-by-step program that helps parents to easily teach their children to read. The wonderful thing about this program is that as long as your child is able to speak, it will help you teach your child to read fluently. I had some doubts initially when I saw that the program claimed that even 2 and 3 year old children can be taught to read effectively; however, my doubts were quickly put to rest when I saw their video proofs of small children reading.

The authors of the program, Jim and Elena, had developed their Children Learning Reading program, and then used it to teach their own children to read before turning 3 years old. They showed various clips of their young 2 year 11 months old daughter reading, and I was quite surprised to see how capable their daughter was at reading by the time she was just a little over 3 years old. I did not expect to see small 3 year old children capable of reading children's books! Here's a video for you to see:

Who Is the Program Designed For?

The Children Learning Reading program is designed for parents with young children between the ages of 2 to 6 years old. It is designed to teach toddlers and small children to read effectively. One important thing to keep in mind is that this program is not designed for extremely young children, or children who have not learned to speak yet. However, if your child has learned to speak, then you can use this program to teach your child to read.

The central goal of the Children Learning Reading program is to help your child learn to decode printed text quickly and learn to read fluently through the critical process of developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is arguably one of the most important aspects of learning to read, and becoming a fluent reader. Children who lack phonemic awareness typically have reading difficulties, and end up being poor readers. Jim & Elena's Children Learning Reading program is an extremely simple, straight forward, and step-by-step program. Their program includes simple exercises and practices starting with the very first lessons that work to help your child develop phonemic awareness, and learn to read. Clinical studies, and even the National Reading Panel has stated that helping children develop phonemic awareness is one of the most effective ways to teach children to read.

How children learn to read

How Does the Children Learning Reading Program Work?

The program is designed to be taught to your child in two stages, and each stage comes with it's own instruction book and step-by-step lessons. Stage 1 helps your child develop all the important foundational skills of learning to read and read fluently, while stage 2 lessons deal with slightly more advanced lessons helping to greatly advance your child's already impressive reading skills developed from stage 1 lessons.

There are 28 lesson in stage one that are smoothly laid out to teach your child starting with the building blocks of reading printed text. The alphabet letters and sounds are introduced to your child in a stepped, sensible, and intuitive order through the 28 lessons. Very simple words and blending exercises are introduced very early on, and more complicated words, sentences, stories, and rhymes are slowly introduced with the lessons as your child progress. By the time you complete stage one lessons with your child, your child will have already developed superb reading skills that sometimes leave you even surprised and amazed.

Once you complete stage one, you can move on to stage 2 lessons, which involve teaching some more complicated matters dealing with reading. There are 22 lessons in stage two. One of the main focus of this stage is teaching your child letter combinations or also known as digraphs. The words, sentences, lesson stories, and rhymes here are more advanced, and work to greatly increase your child's reading skills and reading fluency.

The one thing that really struck a chord with me about this program is that it doesn't force your child to explicitly memorize any phonics rules! Being parents, I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to have toddlers and young children memorize rules to reading! The wonderful thing about Jim & Elena's Children Learning Reading program is that throughout the entire program, your child learns to read, and develops phenomenal reading and decoding skills without memorizing any phonics rules. This is why their program is so effective at teaching children to read.

Another huge plus of this program is that the step-by-step lessons are designed to be quick and effective. Each lesson typically takes no longer than 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and some lessons take just 2 or 3 minutes to complete. As you can imagine, with the short attention span of small children, short lessons like these will be much more effective and productive than long, drawn-out lessons. To teach your child to read, all that you need to do is follow the lessons step-by-step, and spend 5 to 10 minutes each day consistently teaching your child to read. In just 12 short weeks, you will be extremely pleased that you have taken then time and effort to give your child the most important skill in life - reading.

The Children Learning Reading program gets my 100% recommendation.

Children Learning Reading Official Site

How children learn to read and write

Most parents, at one point or another, frets over the education and the development of their children. Many concerned parents research and seek information on the topic of teaching children to read and write. I for one, am glad to see so many parents wanting to get an early start for their children in reading and writing, because studies have shown that developing these abilities early on before entering school provides numerous benefits and advantages later on as the child progresses through school.

More worrisome should be the fact that over one third, 38% to be exact, of all grade 4 students cannot even achieve a basic level of reading ability according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is an alarming statistic. Will your child become one of the 38% who cannot reach basic reading achievement by grade 4? For most children, this poor ability to read can be easily prevented with early phonemic awareness teaching.

Reading must begin early in the life of a child, whether it is just an alphabet letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or a story. Teaching children how to read must begin early on, and children should be exposed to books, stories, rhymes, and be read to on a daily basis. Children as young as 2 years old can learn to read if you teach them to read with the proper instructions. Please watch the video below of a 2 year 11 months old reading randomly constructed sentences.

As Lida Williams said, almost 100 years ago:

Phonics is not a method of teaching reading, but it is a necessary part of every good, modern method. It is the key to word mastery, and word mastery is one of the first essentials in learning to read. A knowledge of the sounds of letters, and of the effect of the position of the letter upon its sound, is an essential means of mastering the mechanics of reading, and of enabling children to become independent readers.

100 years later, this still holds true. There has been a great debate on what method of teaching is best to teach children how to read: whether phonics or the whole language method is better. The whole language learning to read method is more of a "word memorization" plan, where a young child is supposed to memorize the "shape" of the word, and say it.

It is important to distinguish the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness is very broad, and includes phonemic awareness as a sub category. Phonemic awareness is very narrow, and it is only focused on the phonemes, which are the individual sounds of letters. There are no shortage of studies which have repeatedly found and concluded that teaching phonemic awareness to young children produces exceptional reading and spelling abilities. You can read more about research on phonemic awareness here.

The whole language method simply expects a child to "read" when presented reading material, and by memorizing sight words. The phonics method is a bottom up approach where you teach children to read in a logical and sequential order. You first teach children the alphabet letters and the sounds they represent; then you teach children to combine (or blend) various letter sounds together to form words; which is then followed by reading sentences and simple stories. This is a logical progression for children learning to read, where they develop accuracy in decoding words and pronouncing words. This method of teaching also helps the child to spell correctly.

There's no doubt that phonics and phonemic awareness instruction is the superior method to teach children how to read. We have successfully used phonemic awareness instructions to teach our children at age 2 to read words, sentences, paragraphs, and simple story books. If you would like to learn about our simple, step-by-step method to teach your children to read and write, please click below:

What is phonemic awareness

Phonemic Awareness is defined as the ability to identify, hear, and work with the smallest units of sound known as phonemes. It is NOT the same as phonological awareness, instead, it is a sub-category of phonological awareness. For example, phonemic awareness is narrow, and deals only with phonemes and manipulating the individual sounds of words - such as /c/, /a/, and /t/ are the individual sounds that make up to form the word "cat". Phonological awareness on the other hand, includes the phonemic awareness ability, and it also includes the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate larger units of sound such as rimes and onsets.

Phonemic awareness can be taught very early on, and will play a critical role in helping children learn to read and spell. While it's not set in stone on when a child can learn to read, however, I do believe that a child that can speak is a child that can learn to read. Children as young as two years old can learn to read by developing phonemic awareness, and they can learn to read fluently. Please see a video of a 2 year old (2yr11months) reading below.

Below are several of the most common phonemic awareness skills that are often practiced with students and young children:

• Phonemic identity - being able to recognize common sounds in different words such as /p/ is the common sound for "pat", "pick", and "play".
• Phonemic isolation - being able to recognize the individual sounds of words such as /c/ is the beginning sound of "cat" and /t/ is the ending sound of "cat".
• Phoneme substitution - being able to change one word to another by substituting one phoneme. For example changing the /t/ in "cat" to /p/ now makes "cap".
• Word Segmenting - the parent says the word "lap", and the child says the individual sounds: /l/, /a/, and /p/.
• Oral blending - the parent says the individual sounds such as /r/, /e/, and /d/, and the child forms the word from the sounds to say "red".

Studies have found that phonemic awareness is the best predictor of reading success in young children. Research has also found that children with a high level of phonemic awareness progress with high reading and spelling achievements; however, some children with low phonemic awareness experience difficulties in learning to read and spell. Therefore, it is important for parents to help their young children develop good phonemic awareness. [1]

Being able to oral blend and segment words helps children to read and spell. According to the National Reading Panel, oral blending helps children develop reading skills where printed letters are turned into sounds which combine to form words. Additionally, word segmenting helps children breakdown words into their individual sounds (phonemes), and helps children learn to spell unfamiliar words.

As a young child begins to develop and master phonemic awareness skills, they will discover an entirely new world in print and reading. You will open up their world to a whole new dimension of fun and silliness. They will be able to read books that they enjoy, develop a better understanding of the world around them through printed materials, and have a whole lot of fun by making up new nonsense words through phonemic substitutions.

For example, we taught our daughter to read at a young age - when she was a little over 2 and a half years old. Before she turned three, she would run around the house saying all types of silly words using phonemic substitution. One of her favorite was substituting the letter sound /d/ in "daddy" with the letter sound /n/. So, she would run around me in circles and repeatedly say "nanny, nanny, come do this" or "nanny, nanny, come play with me" etc... Of course, she only did this when she wanted to be silly and to make me laugh, at other times, she would of course properly refer to me as "daddy", and not "nanny". She is well aware of the differences between these words and is fully capable of using phonemic substitution to change any of the letters in the words to make other words. 

Click here to learn how to easily and quickly teach your child to read.

Tips to teaching phonemic awareness

Helping young children develop phonemic awareness early on is one of the keys for children to develop exceptional reading and writing skills once they begin attending schools. Did you know that studies have indicated that phonemic awareness is the single best predictor of reading success for young children once they begin school? In fact, studies have found that phonemic awareness is far better than IQ at predicting the reading and spelling abilities of young children.

Most people  know about phonics, and what it is; however, far fewer people know what phonemic awareness is. In short, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with the phonemes. For example, /d/, /o/, and /g/, are the individual sounds of the word "dog". Please note, the letters enclosed in the slashes denotes the sound of the letter, and not the name of the letter. Phonemes are the smallest units of individual sounds that form a word.

Phonemic awareness is not something you're born with, and it is an ability that's gained through repeated exposure to listening, speaking, and reading. As parents, there are many different strategies you can use to help your children develop phonemic awareness such as playing simple word segmentation or oral blending games.

Like most parents, we (my wife and I) read bedtime stories before we put our children to sleep, and one of the best strategies that we like to use to teach phonemic awareness to our children, is to mix in word segmenting and oral blending when we read bedtime stories for our kids. This is an exceptional method, because it doesn't take any extra time or effort, since reading bedtime stories is something you already do. So, here's how to go about it.

Let's say that you're reading a nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill":

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

Instead of reading each word straight through the rhyme, you can randomly mix in oral blending on various words in the rhyme. Please note: instead of using slashes "/" to denote phonemes, we'll simply use hyphens to make it easier to read. So, let's assume that your child is very young, perhaps 2, 3, or 4 years old, and you want to start helping them develop some phonemic awareness. You can read Jack and Jill like so:

J-ack and J-ill went up the h-ill
To fetch a p-ail of water.
J-ack fell down and broke his crown
And J-ill came tumbling after.

As you can see, when you read the rhyme, you simply make an effort to separate several of the first letters sounds from the words, such as /J/ from "ack", and /J/ from "ill". As your child begins to grasp the concept of individual sounds making up words, you can slowly increase the difficulty by breaking down each word further. For example:

Jack
J-ack
J-a-ck

Repeated exposure of this type of word segmenting and oral blending will slowly help your child develop a sense and an understanding that each word is made up of individual sounds - in other words, you are teaching phonemic awareness to your children during bedtime stories without them even knowing that they are being taught to! 

>> Teach your child to read today using a step-by-step, proven method for teaching young children to read