5 Tips To Make Learning To Read Easier

To thrive at school and then develop the best possible career, your child needs to be an excellent reader. Just being able to read is not enough.

Kids who enjoy reading often read 2-3 books a week, the same as some children read in months. So the advantage they have is increasing all the time.

Here are 5 techniques we use in our Easyread System to help a child develop a love of reading:

TIP 1 - Don't Read Books

You probably think I'm nuts now! But we have seen so many children who have travelled down the wrong path, because of early reading books. It isn't the right way for a child to first start reading.

You see, a clever kid will look at an early reader book and memorise the words that keep being repeated, and guess the others from the context. That gives the impression of progress. But the child is driven to more and more guessing as the books get more complicated.

Eventually you will see a collapse of confidence at around 6 or 7 years old.

TIP 2 - "Dimensionalise" the Phonemes

Phonemes are the little sounds that make up words. And there are 43 of them in English. You can find them at the beginning of your dictionary. We need to make sure your child is familiar with them.

But phonemes are non-physical, abstract objects and very hard for your child to remember. So what we do is create strong visual characters to represent each one. For instance, for the sounds of the letter A we have the ants in pink pants, the ape in a cape and the ark in the park. Those are things your child can visualise and so remember.

The majority of your child's memory capacity is visual.

TIP 3 - Play These Games

We are avoiding books. So what else can you do?

Try these games, that work very well for us:

Build-A-Word. Select 6 plastic letters, including two vowels. Repeat the main sound of each one. Then think of a simple word for your child to write with them.

Select-A-Word. On a piece of paper, write three similar words, like hot, hat, pat. Read one of them out loud and ask your child to select which word it is.

Nonsense Words. Using your plastic letters again, write a nonsense word, like leb, kib, teg, vod. Ask your child to try to read it.

Easyread-I-Spy. If you know the classic "I Spy..." game, play it using the first sound of the object, rather than the first letter.

TIP 4 - Less is More

Never do more than 15 minutes of reading practise at a go. Any more and your child's concentration level will begin to dip.

TIP 5 - Try Easyread TrainerText

TrainerText is how we let a child read unaided, while learning. The visual image for each phoneme in a word is floating above the text, so that the child can check if a word is unfamiliar. You can do the same with the images you have created in tip 2.

Using TrainerText the fear of the text goes away, because your child can always check the images for help when needed. So confidence can build quickly.

Using this sort of approach, we see a new engagement with reading immediately and then a surge of confidence over the first 21 days. If you use these tips I am sure you will see the same thing.