Reading is one of the critical development skills that children are expected to learn as they grow.
In many schools, children are expected to be able to read with basic competency by the end of the second grade.
For this reason, many parents are taking matters into their own hands when it comes to the topic of how to teach a child to read.
Parents are reading to their children, playing rhyming and word games, teaching the alphabet and even the basics of phonetics.
That is a fantastic start, but one more thing you can do as a parent is try to familiarize your child with a group of words called sight words.
What are they? They are a group of basic, common English words that children are expected to recognize "by sight" (hence the name) even if they do not yet know the meaning.
These words actually comprise 50-70% of written and spoken language.
They are words such as "the," "and", and "it.
" Sight words also include the pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and certain nouns, adverbs, adjectives and verbs.
Children are encouraged to recognize sight words without use of phonetics, but matters become tricky when you think of how to teach a child to read these words.
A lot of these words cannot be deciphered phonetically.
Another problem is that you cannot draw a picture for most of them to describe the meaning.
Thus, memorization appears to be the most efficient way to learn these words.
Start by giving your child just a few sight words to learn each week.
Make memorization fun by turning it into a game like Memory or Word Search.
Have your child circle each sight word they recognize in magazines and books- luckily, there's a plethora to be found on each page.
Say and repeat sight words with your child.
Even better, say or write sentences to make the words memorable.
Lots of sight words are in song phrases, so if it helps, sing that line of song to your child; it certainly makes it easier to remember.
Lastly, to help ensure your child learns the essential sight words, look to proven teaching programs.
A good program to try is the Fat Brain Phonics system.
This was developed by a parent who has a young child who was having trouble learning to read.
It has many proven methods of teaching sight words, and a list of 101 of the highest frequency ones.
In addition, there are effective phonetic lessons that you can go through with your child.
Learning sight words is essential to a child's reading and learning development.
Luckily, as a concerned parent there are many ways for you to become involved in ensuring your child learns these critical words.
Rather than telling a stranger to "help my child read," you can take matters in your own hands.
With creative word play games and a supplemental learning program such as Fat Brain Phonics, your child can learn to read in a fun, productive way.
This article is copyright © Jasmine Newhart