The world of letters is really exciting, especially if you have mastered the ABC easily and can finally read all the exciting books on your own. The children are usually very enthusiastic when it comes to learning to read in elementary school at the latest. But until that happens, the kids have to train hard, because practice makes perfect reading! But what is the best way to learn to read? And what should parents pay attention to so that learning to read is not a problem? What are the most important aspects of learning to read?
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First Steps To Reading
Of course, learning to read does not work right away. Reading is a lengthy process that goes through several phases and, above all, is the result of a lot of hard work, dedication, and reading training. When learning to read, the children are first made playfully familiar with the sound-letter connections in our language. This usually happens between the ages of 5 and 6, when the language acquisition has largely been completed.
Even if most of the children are now quite confident in their mother tongue, this does not mean that they have to read fluently when they start school! In elementary and preschool, the kids learn to decipher the individual letters of the ABC with the help of fun exercises, songs, and rhymes and to assign different sounds to them.
The mysterious characters are gradually deciphered, with the various letters being given the corresponding sounds. Regardless of whether you are reading aloud at school or reading quietly in the children’s room – from now on, the words read will be “heard” in your head.
Sounds help to learn to read
In a further step, this reading process is expanded so that entire sound sequences such as syllables and finally words are recorded and included in the children’s word and reading treasure trove. These letter sequences are now given meaning through their sound, so that “reading rules” can later be derived from them completely automatically. Exactly as with a translation, the different letter sequences of the reading texts are translated into sound sequences in this reading-learning phase.
This sound sequence translation is particularly helpful when reading new words. New letters are compared with already known letter sequences and then derived from them. A sound and thus a meaning can be assigned to the new word from memory.
But watch out: since our reading texts are not written in pure phonetic transcription, some exquisite words sound a little different than they are written in the book. Correct pronunciation, therefore, requires frequent corrections while reading. This is why reading aloud is so important, especially for beginners. Only in this way can the little readers learn the correct sound of the words.