Although there are no quick ways to teach children to read…

…it doesn’t have to be a difficult task. We’ll outline the basic skills children must master in order to learn to read and reading activities that provide meaningful practice.

The National Reading Panel’s (NPR) 2000 report identified five areas of reading instruction that must be addressed in order to teach children to read:

1. Phonemic Awareness: Being able to notice, understand, and work with the sounds in words.
2. Phonics: A method of teaching reading, based on sounding out letters to read words.
3. Fluency: Being able to read accurately and quickly.
4. Vocabulary: Knowing what words mean when we hear and read them.
5. Text Comprehension: Truly understanding what is read.

Today, let’s focus first on reading activities to build phonemic awareness.

How can I help my child gain phonemic awareness?

There are many activities that can help parents accomplish this task. Here are two simple ones that you can do with your child without having to buy, make, or read anything (other than this post!).

NOTE: When you see a letter between slashes, /a/, it represents the sound of the letter. When you see a letter in bold, a, it represents the name of the letter.

Activity 1:

Parent: Listen to this word: cat. One more time: cat. /k/ /a/ /t/. Can you say the word?
Child: cat.
Parent: Good job! Now can you say the sounds? /k/ /a/ /t/.
(If your child makes an error, be positive–“Good try! That was pretty close! You almost got it!”–and ask him to try again.)
Child: /k/ /a/ /t/.
Parent: That was great! Now write each letter for the word cat. Write the letter that makes this sound /k/ (allow your child to write the letter c); /a/ (allow your child to write the letter a); /t/ (allow your child to write the letter t).
Child: /k/ (child writes letter c); /a/ (child writes letter a); /t/ (child writes letter t); cat.
Parent: You said AND wrote the word cat. You are so smart! (Now try more words like fan, sad, bat, pig, pen, and box.)

Activity 2:

Watch this video with your child. Listen to the narrator and follow the prompts:

What is shared reading?

Shared reading is an interactive reading experience in which children join in reading a story or book, guided by an experienced reader. With Hooked on Phonics shared reading animated stories, we want to mimic this activity as closely as possible.

Traditionally, shared reading has been done in the classroom with big books; however, in the absence of a teacher, we used Visual Phonics, animation, and actors to bring to life the same sounds and words that the kids learn in their Learn to Read workbooks. (Visual Phonics refers to our method of presenting phonics instruction through animated text.)

How it works

Hooked on Phonics shared reading animation highlights words in the stories so they can be seen and read clearly by children. We use stories from the workbooks to provide kids with the opportunity for repeated readings of predictable text and words. The amusing stories and funny illustrations keep children interested and engaged but don’t distract them from focusing on the text. Our animated workbook stories also help kids practice sight word recognition, fluency, tracking text from left to right, and other important stuff.

But most of all, the shared reading stories illustrate one of the main principles of the new Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read program: using phonics as a tool to help children learn to read fun stories and encourage a lifelong love of reading.

See for yourself