Is there anything a parent wants more than happiness and success for their child?

In the modern world, a key ingredient to a child’s happiness is their success in school. Nothing contributes more to that success than reading and writing skills. Here are three questions that many parents have regarding teaching their children to read:

• Should parents give their children a head start in learning to read? A child’s chance of succeeding in school is low if her reading skills are underdeveloped. The difficulties would accompany any reading deficiencies your child may have.
• Is it enough to hope for the best, that is, is it risky to take a wait-and-see approach? Wouldn’t it make sense to take steps to ensure that your child can read at a level that allows them to focus on the many other demands of school?
• What is the best way to teach children to read?

This article addresses the latter question. Interestingly and unexpectedly, there is a sometimes scandalous debate about which of the two approaches to teaching a child to read is superior: Phonics pours full language.

Phonics proposes to believe that the best way to teach children to read is to give them the ability to ‘pronounce’ a written word and thus recognize it. They see the three letters in the word cat, they know the sound that each letter makes, and thus they can discover, by linking the sounds together, that it is a word they know.

full language it’s harder to describe. In essence, it focuses on meaning: making meaning by reading; Express meaning when writing. It advocates a love of books, uses “guided reading,” and encourages group “read aloud.”

Fortunately, the debate is less heated than before and few feel squarely on one side or the other. The most thoughtful compromise is some combination of the two methods: ‘Phonetics within the whole language’.

Long before any debate on phonics: whole language, parents and teachers used a gentle and simple technique to teach children to read. It is still valid and even elegantly combines phonetics and full language. That technique is simply reading aloud to your child while he points to each word. Wonderful. But, it has two disadvantages:

• significant time cost, a problem for busy parents
• does not fully utilize your child’s natural curiosity, energy, and burning desire to learn

Internet to the rescue. Now, there are web-based systems that help even very young children learn to read on their own. By necessity, any computer-based system must focus on phonics-based instruction because whole language instruction requires a patient and caring individual to impart meaning and convey the joy of reading.

So whether or not you choose web-based computer assistance to help your child learn to read, there is still room, even in the modern world, for you as a parent to contribute the old-fashioned way: reading. while pointing out words and sharing meaning and joy, to this exciting and crucial part of your child’s development.