WHAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT FIRST, LETTER NAME OR LETTER SOUND, UPPER CASE OR LOWER CASE

let's consider following factors first:

1. The total words per-page of any given reading materials contain over 90% of lower case letters. Pick up any book, magazine or flier beside you; go through it you will find out that it contains great percent of lower case.

 2. Letter sound makes it possible for child to read some unknown words by themselves but are limited to certain extent due to lack of knowledge of the letter names.

 3. Letter names also make reading possible but the child will depend heavily on the teacher teaching him because whole world method is used when a child only has letter names knowledge.
   
Looking at the above factor you could tell that teaching lower case letters first is more important than teaching upper case letters and also teaching of letter sound first has more advantage than teaching letter names first according to the research. But there is now a developed technique which makes it possible to teach letter names and letter sound as well teaching of upper case and lower case simultaneously. A child taught the four skills will be able to read any book that involve upper case and lower case as well as applied the knowledge of letter names to study some tricky words which he come across while reading.

In conclusion, the four skills are important and could be taught simultaneously, but if the child cannot cope to learn everything together, letter names, letter sound and lower case letters must be taught first while the upper case comes later.  

WHEN DO WE NEED TO START TEACHING A CHILD HOW TO READ ?

The first thing is to start teaching the child to recognize as many objects as possible. This will enable such child to quickly identify letters of the alphabets and blend words when the time comes. Limit your lessons only on identification of objects. Get big images of objects and practice the identification on daily bases.

After the child can identify as much objects as possible. Get flash cards with images or picture books. Cover it and ask the child what is with you by calling the sound of the letters of the objects. For example, hhh aaa t, rrr aaa mmm, c aaa t, and so on. Have a pause between the sounds. Show the child the picture of the object you are trying to say after the child has gotten the answer. You have just introduce the child to what we call oral blending.

The next thing is the phoneme awareness which is the sound of the letters. Introduce the phonemes one after the other orally, starting with those ones that can be stretched like f,m,n,a,l,s,e,r then the bouncy phonemes like b,d,t,p,c,g and so on. It is very important to teach them the correct sound. Ask the child, do you hear ffff in fan or man, do you hear t in mat or cap, do you hear sss in big or sun.

Now teach the letters with their basic sound. Show the child how the letters are formed and teach the letters one at a time. Relate the letters with known objects that give the basic sound of  the letters. You can as well teach the child how to blend as he/she learns the letters. You don't need to wait until he/she master all the letters.

The above steps start as soon as the child start talking which is always one and half years of age.  

PHONICS AND PHONEMIC AWRENESS

Phonics and phoneme awareness are interwoven. As phonics focus on ability to blend sound of letters to form words, Phoneme awareness makes it possible for a child to be able to identify the sound unit of words and oral blending and manipulation of the sound of the letters to form more and more words.

The following are taught in phoneme awareness.
1. Phoneme identification: identification of letters and their sound
2. Oral blending: blending of sound orally
3. Substitution of sound to form new words. E.g. in the word 'mat', if I change 't' to 'n' what will it give me, man.
4. Segmenting. This is the ability to tell the sound that make a given word. E.g. the word 'mat' has the sound m a t.
5. Addition of sound. E.g. If I add 's' with 'top' it will give me 'stop'    

AT WHAT AGE DO CHILDTRN NEED TO START READING

The answer to this questions is not a straight forward answer. It depends on the kind of parents and the child.
Some parent don't bother rushing their child when it comes to learning to read. They rather wait for the child to reach 6 years before he/she starts reading. Some parents are in haste to see their child reading. They want their child to start reading as early as 3 years old. This is no mistake because it is very possible.

The child in question may be slow when it comes to learning. Once the parents are aware of this, they tend not to rush that child. The child may be having a kind of learning difficulties. What most parents don't know is that this learning difficulties can be corrected or reduced. The longer they wait to help such child, the harder it becomes. I have seen parents that don't expect much from their child while young, but as the child grows old they suddenly start expecting the child to be performing well.

Looking at the educational demand, you will notice that much is expected from children of nowadays compare to the past. The curriculum continues to be developed from time to time and more and more things are added. In order to meet up with the new curriculum, it is expected of a child to start reading earlier than before.

The minimum age for a child to start reading now is 4 years old, maximum is 5 years old for challenged child. Failure to read at this particular age brings about difficulty in understanding what the child is taught as he/she grows older because lapses as been created right from their childhood.

HOW TO TEACH YOUR CHILD WITH PHONICS

I have prepared a step by step synthetic phonics curriculum which can be used to teach children how to read.  Click the link below to get your free copy and feel free to ask me questions on what you don't understand. This is the link:

7 steps to synthetic phonics

What is Dyslexia ?
Dyslexia is a difficulty with reading and writing caused by the brain being unable to see the difference between some letter shapes. A child that have problem with dyslexia always find it difficult to understand the shape of the letters of the alphabets. When he/she sees a words, the look in his/her eyes is always different to what is actually written. A child looking at letter 'b' may see it as letter 'p' or letter 'd'. This difficulty is not always detected at the very early stage, as the child grows up, he/she becomes more frustrated in learning .The child with this may not be able to copy from the board and will also be unable to read and call the letters in words.

Dyslexia children do need a multi-sensory approach in order to make them to be able to understand the letter shapes. The multi-sensory approach is mostly used in Montessori schools. It involves the effective usage of the three sense organ. The sense of seeing, the sense of hearing and the sense of touching.


When learning the letters, make a big print of the letters on a paper for the child to be able see it very well. Allow the child to feel the letters by giving him/her a plastic letters, he/she may even trace the letters on the print with finger to know the formation of the letters. Trace on sand tray is also effective. When writing, gently show step by step approach of writing the letters. Another way is by relating the letters with object that can easily be remembered and also telling them the sound and demonstrating the gesture of the sound made by the letters.   

TYPES OF READING METHODS

There are two major types of reading methods. They are:
1. Phonics and
2. Whole word method

1. Phonics is considered the best teaching method due to its simplicity and flexibility. It is a student centered method of teaching reading. The children learn the letter names and their sound simultaneously. Then learn to blend the sound of the letters to form words. Children don't depend heavily on teachers and mostly pronounce words that they haven't seen before when reading.

2. Whole word method is another way of teaching children to read. Children do lot of memorization with this method and they do rely heavily on teachers to assist them. There are two way approach to this method. The first approach is by reading interesting stories to children, as the child read the stories over and over again they get familiar with the words used in the stories. The second approach is by treating the words in the stories before reading.

READING FOR CHILDREN

The child in the video below is taught using phonics. Check it out