Learn what you need to know to get your child started with reading!
As parents, we want our kids to learn how to read so they don't fall behind in school and life. It’s that basic skill that’s fundamental no matter what career they end up with. As a mom and Montessori certified teacher, a question I often get is, ‘How do I teach my child to read?’ In this blog, I’ll share the 5 steps to teaching your toddler how to read in no time using the Montessori way that I covered in my book “Fresh Montessori.”
First of all, if you’re teaching your kids to alphabet song, STOP! That’s not the order or the way to teach your child to read. In fact, it may be doing more harm than good. Rather, you should introduce the phonetic sounds to help your toddler to read faster. When I’m in a classroom setting, I typically use this order when introducing sounds to children. This order goes from least difficult to most difficult for children to enunciate based on how the muscles in their mouth is developing.
Now, something they don’t teach you in school, and this is something I’ve learned only after having my son, is that you can actually start introducing sounds to your child once they’re beginning to imitate different sounds in their environment. When this happens, rather than using the order I just showed you, I would recommend teaching them to associate the letter symbols to the phonetic sounds that they’re already able to make.
So, for instance, when my son was showing signs of readiness, I started introducing him to sounds like ‘a’ or ‘b’ by showing him these sounds while he would say them. My son is currently 15 months old, and by now he’s able to identify 5 phonetic sounds. I’d like to emphasize how this should NEVER be forced. With any educational approach, it is important to follow how the child is developing. To be effective when teaching any child requires that you follow their natural ability to learn.
Here are 3 things to keep in mind when beginning to teach your child phonics:
As your child is mastering the different phonetic sounds of the alphabet, you can slowly begin introducing them to the beginning phonetic sounds of different words. You need to make sure that these words begin with a phonetic sound. For instance, asking them what the beginning sound of cheese is will confuse them, because the word starts with ‘ch’ not ‘c’. This exercise will help them understand that words are formed using different letter sounds. Now, the next few steps will require a little bit of explaining.
In Montessori, once children have mastered their phonetic sounds, and have an idea of how words are a composition of different letter sounds, they then go through 3 colored series to help them progress in their language development. The first is the Pink scheme series, followed by the blue scheme series, then the green scheme series. In these next few steps, I’ll be discussing with you how you can begin using these series in sequential order to teach your child how to read and spell.
Let’s begin with the Pink and Blue Scheme series.
The Pink Scheme Series introduces children to reading, spelling, and writing three-letter phonetic words. The first thing they will be taught with this series is how to spell 3-letter phonetic words. To do this, children need to know and understand terms related to sequencing, for instance, ‘first’, ‘next’, and ‘last’. So, you can begin incorporating these terms in your everyday language. An example would be talking to your child about the order their clothes will be put on, or the order of who’s lining up.
In Montessori, children are taught to spell using moveable alphabets, with consonants colored in red, and vowels in blue. This helps children to understand the role that consonants and vowels play in word formations. These are used along with objects or pictures that children will be asked to identify the beginning sounds of or to spell with.
Here, I’ve included a free printable moveable alphabet, as well as printouts of images that are spelt with 3-letter phonetic words that you can use with your child.
To begin teaching them how to spell, you can start off by teaching them how to spell words with 3-letter phonetic sounds. These are words like ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘bug’, ‘lip’, or ‘hen’. Begin by asking them what’s the beginning sound, the next sound, then the last sound. This is why I mentioned earlier that it’s important for them to learn terms related to sequencing because they will be hearing the words ‘first’, ‘next’ and ‘last’ a lot. Once finished, read the words to them, exaggerating the sounds of the letters as you’re reading them to show how the combination of sounds creates the word. For instance, when you’re reading ‘cat’ you can read it like ‘c-a-t’ this spells cat.
Now, once your child is able to spell 3-letter phonetic words with ease, you can begin introducing them to reading 3-letter phonetic words. To do this, it will require children to learn how to blend letters together. So, begin by helping them blend two sounds at a time, then slowly incorporate the last phonetic sound in the word. For instance, with the word ‘cat’ you can start off by showing them how ‘c’ and ‘a’ blend together to make the sound ‘ca’. Once they’re able to blend those two sounds together, you can then introduce them to adding on the sound ‘t’.
Once your child has mastered spelling and reading 3-letter phonetic words, you can slowly introduce them to spelling words with more than 3 phonetic letter sounds, then reading words with more than 3 phonetic letter sounds. You would do this by using the same technique as spelling and reading 3-letter phonetic words. If your child already knows how to read phonetic words, but is struggling to read phonograms, which are letter combinations that represent non-phonetic sounds, such as, ‘ch’, or ‘ee'.
One thing you can start teaching your child much earlier are hand signals. Here, I share the top 10 hand signals you should be teaching your toddler. Some of my favorites are “Milk," “No, thank you,” and “Open.”
I'll see you in that video! Stay FRESH!
