Teaching a 3 year old to read has never been an easy task. Most parents don’t know how to help their children to read, and this is why we find so many children struggle with reading while others hate this skill due to the reading difficulties they encounter.
Here are 9 tips to teach your 3 year old child to read:
1. Use activities to build phonemic awareness
Children can play with words, syllables, and rhymes they hear in everyday conversations to get ready to read. This is called phonological awareness. As they can do some activities to recognize sounds or phonemes. This is called phonemic awareness.
Parents should introduce phonological and phonemic awareness as pre-reading skills to prepare their kids for reading. This is one of the most important and effective methods to teach a child to read.
2. Use listening and rhyming words
Read aloud to your kids or make them listen to songs and nursery rhymes. Then Draw their attention to the rhyming words so that you can try the “rhyme time” activity: I think of an animal that rhymes with “fat”, what is it? Answer: “cat”. What else rhymes with fat? At – sat – flat- hat ….. Rhyming words will help your children learn about the word families as they help them notice and work with the sounds within words.
3. Sounds counting and blending
So as to build phonemic awareness you can use word cards. Give your children a word card then make them break the word into individual sounds and cut them. After this, make your kids count the phonemes in the word. Then blend the sounds and let the kids put them in the correct order.
This activity focuses on phonemic awareness and synthetic phonics methods that are highly recommended to teach a 3 year old to read.
4. Help the child sound out words
Have the child practice reading by sounding out sounds, alphabets, words, and sentences. To do so, start with one-syllable words, and two or three-word sentences in order to make it easy. Increase the number of syllables in a word and the number of words in a sentence gradually.
This way will help your children understand how sounds and syllables work to form words. Moreover, it gives your toddler self-confidence to read aloud.
5. Use pictures and familiar words
When you start teaching a 3 year old to read using unfamiliar words, the process of learning to read looks more difficult. That’s why you should start first with familiar words which include the kid’s own names, their friend’s names, their pets, their favorite meals, their toys… And of course, using pictures to introduce a new word will be always a good choice.
6. Interesting texts and pictures
Your kids may find the process of learning to read boring. To attract your kid’s attention you’d better use interesting texts and books. For instance, you can start with words and pictures about their favorite cartoons and characters. This will motivate your children to learn to read and make them enjoy the process.
7. Use games
Resorting to educational games to teach a 3 year old to read is of course a perfect choice. you can use the tablet or the laptop for online interactive games, or use word cards, picture cards, and word puzzles for traditional games so as to help your children recognize phonemes and rhymes.
This will make the process of learning to read enjoyable and fun. There are plenty of games on the net that target teaching to read, all you have to do is an online search.
8. Be a good example
Children tend to imitate their parents. That’s why you should let your kids see you reading every day. Make it a habit for both you and your kids. When they see you read they become motivated to read, they may even take your books or magazines and try to read them.
So being a good example is another key to motivate your children to learn to read.
9. Praising and rewarding
Finally, an effective way to keep your toddlers eager to read is by praising and rewarding them. When they do well make them feel it and encourage them by giving positive comments on their work.
You can also reward them with chocolate or by taking them to the zoo for example. Praising and rewarding children for their efforts motivates them to do better and enhances their performance in reading.
Conclusion
There are many other tips to follow while teaching a 3 year old to read. Yet the aforementioned tips are the most efficient ones.
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