You Can Teach Your Child To Read! Week 2

Last week we talked about teaching your child the sounds of the letters of the alphabet.  Your assignment was to teach your kindergarten age child two letter-sounds. This week you will learn how to produce your own letter cards on the computer, and you will teach three new letter-sounds to your child.

Make your own letters on the computer.  Use the Arial font because it has simpler letter shapes.  Make the letters BIG—in at least a size 200—while your child is learning the letter-sounds.  You will be able to print between 4 and 9 letters per page.  Print it onto cardstock if possible, and cut the letters apart.  As before, teach only one new letter-sound at a time, but continue to review previously learned sounds. This is important.  It may seem slow at first, but you want your child to have plenty of time to recognize the shape of the letter and to associate it with its sound before you introduce a new one.

These are letter-sounds to teach this week.  Note:  Teach the short sound of the letter o.  It makes a sound like /aw/ as you hear in the word dog. After your child has learned these first five letter-sounds, we will talk about learning to blend the sounds to make words.

Many children, especially boys, are not going to sit down, fold their hands at a little desk, and wait to find out what you want them to learn. So don’t ask them to sit if they want to stand, and don’t spend more than couple of minutes at a time teaching the sounds. The key to teaching active children is to teach a little at a time, several times a day. If you are working and are not home all day, you can still do this—you might want to teach one thing right after work, repeat the teaching just before dinner or just after dinner and repeat it again just before bedtime. Whatever works for you is fine, as long as there is repetition. After your child has learned these first five letter-sounds, we will talk about learning to blend the sounds to make words.