10 Tips on Teaching Your Child to Read

Teaching reading is a process for the majority, but like all things that require effort, worth it in the end. I don't even remember (mostly) the struggles of teaching my almost 8 year old to read since I see the joy that reading brings him nowadays. He is currently enjoying the classic Three Musketeers and I hope to get him starte don Ben Hur soon as we're studying the early church in history. He can easily loose himself in a book for hours. But it has yet always been that way. I can imagine two years ago waiting for it to click all together and sure enough, that summer it began. So now as I go through the process with my daughter and wait for her to love reading and forget that she hated learning to read, here are 10 tips to teach reading: 1. Find a curriculum you love and stick with it. For us it was Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy Lessons 2. If you do use the 100 easy lessons book, be advised you will hit points where you need to take a step back and go back to an earlier lesson. 3. Take deep breaths and stay calm... When you get frustrated that they're getting frustrated, it can get ugly. 4. Don't compare them to someone else. Not everyone walks at the same age or crawls at the sometime or potty trains at the same time... So do NOT compare! God designed us all differently... Be patient and know it will come. 5. Keep on reading other books to the, when it's not reading time... Otherwise I think they could begin to resent books completely. 6. Hide the pictures! Try and keep them focused on the words and sounds so they're not guessing their way through the story or getting distracted. 7. Have their eyesight checked at some point. You never know if some of their struggles could be vision related. 8. Don't just ask them to read books... Have them help read small parts of signs, something on the Internet, t-shirts, etc. they need to understand how universal reading is... They can use it everywhere everyday! 9. Don't give up because what your really doing is giving up on them. Yes it's hard, yes it will drive you batty at times... But persevere! At times it will seem there is no end in sight, but one day it will be all worth it. You want to make reading something to enjoy, so try and be encouraging and uplifting. Think on a time when you had to master something difficult and take heart, this too shall pass. 10. Allow them to pick out things they'd enjoy to read BUT also pick out things that will push them a little beyond what they think their limit is. Keep them challenged by a good story or less pages. This is as much for myself as it is for everyone else because it's no small feat to not only teach reading, but to teach them to LOVE reading!