One of the most important things you could teach your child is learning how to read. Before they get to a competent point though, you need to focus on how to build pre-reading skills in young children. You'll succeed with this by taking the following actions.
Read to Your Child Every Night
One routine you want to get in the habit of doing is reading your child a story every night. This is one of the best pre-reading activities you could get involved in with your child because they'll develop reading abilities without even knowing it.
For instance, they'll get an idea of the pace of your reading and learn different concepts that your stories cover. They'll also learn how to recognize certain words if you show them the pages that you're reading from. Ultimately, these things will help develop their mind for reading, and then it will be easier for them to transition to reading alone.
Surround Them With Every-Day Reading Stimuli
There are plenty of opportunities to read besides strictly children's books. For instance, there are things like the newspaper, online text, lettering on the TV, and materials in the mail. It's a good idea to surround your child with these everyday materials and practice reading them aloud.
That's going to get your child used to all sorts of reading stimuli, which can give them a good foundation to build off of. When they start reading by themselves, they're not going to be as nervous because they've been exposed to all sorts of real-life reading materials.
Practice Rhyming
One way you can develop pre-reading skills in a fun and interactive way is by practicing rhyming with your child at an early age. They've probably been exposed to rhyming in some of the children's books that you read to them every night.
You can make it a game and thus captivate them the entire time. You just need to pick out words for your child to rhyme with and then reward them when they get a rhyme correct. That will build their confidence and expose them to new words all of the time.
If you want to make it easier for your child to learn how to read, you need to focus on building pre-reading skills as early as possible. This isn't going to be difficult if you know what strategies to focus on and continue working with your child every day.
