How Do Children Learn to Read?

When children learn to read, it is a magical journey that starts with shared moments and grows into a lifelong skill. Children first become familiar with the world of books by reading together, bonding over stories, pictures, and words. With time, they’ll develop foundational skills like letter recognition and phonemic awareness, setting the stage for confident reading. Let’s take a closer look at just how this journey unfolds:

Reading Together

Children learn to read first and foremost by being read to and being immersed in a print-rich environment. Reading books together that contain engaging pictures, rhyme, and a fun storyline introduces children to the world of literacy at a young age. Reading together every day creates a bond and love for reading. Over time children learn how to handle a book, how to turn pages, where to begin reading, and some letter and word recognition.

Knowledge of Letters

The next step in learning to read is mastering the uppercase and lowercase alphabet letter shapes and names. Introducing flashcards with pictures and then without picture clues and using letter magnets is helpful.

Phonemic Awareness

After mastering the alphabet, the next step is to understand the sounds each letter makes. This is a crucial stage in a child’s reading journey, as it’s when they begin to grasp that different letters create different sounds, which in turn change the meaning of words (e.g., hat, fat, sat).

Understanding Short Vowels and Consonants

Now children are ready to learn about the short vowel sounds for the letters a, e, i, o, and u and how each vowel sound changes the word. These sounds are the key to learning how to convert printed words into spoken form. As children begin to understand that written letters represent spoken sounds, they will be able to decode (read) simple words (at, cat, sat, hat, etc.) with practice. In time, children learn to manipulate the vowels and consonants to make different words (rag, tag, bag).

Higher Level Reading Skills

Learning to read short vowel words is a good start and will help jumpstart children on their road to reading. Of course, there are many additional skill sets to master to be a strong reader. They’ll go on to learn vowel patterns, high-frequency words, irregular words, multi-syllabic words, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Give your child the foundation they need to become a confident reader with A Good Start Reading Program! With engaging activities, our program makes learning to read fun and effective.