Teach your child to read faster through experiences and pictures- it  is the most meaningful way to begin reading.

How do experiences improve reading?

Children develop their world knowledge through their personal experiences. These experiences allow children to use their knowledge of the world to help them read and learn. If a child had no experience of a storm it would be very difficult for them to understand the picture above. All the parts of the picture are details about storms. Unless they have seen lightning and know that it appears in the sky as flashes of light, they will not be able to understand this picture knowledge that the artist has drawn.

Black clouds let us know that a storm is coming and if there is wind, the storm can be damaging. The artist has shown the wind by using swirling lines and the wind’s contorted face as it blows its air around. The picture of the raindrops tell us that it is raining. This understanding of the picture is directly related to the child’s personal experience of a storm.  If there has been limited exposure to storms this picture understanding, which is the first level of comprehension, can not be understood without lots of talking and listening. The child’s personal experiences and his ability to use language is the foundation of learning to read.

We have only talked about the background of the picture that tells us that a storm is approaching. If we look at the main part of the picture we can see two characters, Energetic Egg and Dancing Dinosaur.  Personal knowledge/experience tells us that sometimes when there are storms people get scared. Then our knowledge of pictures tells us that the characters’ expressions are those of fear, the tightness of the limbs (picture understanding) is directly related to our personal experience that when we are scared it shows on our face and in the stiffness in the limbs.  As you can see from the previous discussion, there is a vital, direct link between personal experiences and our ability to read.

Reading Words Begins

Once the child has learnt that pictures can tell about the words, reading begins. Sounds will be known and some high frequency words will be learnt http://letterboxlearntoread.com/products-2/high-frequency-word-cards/ These steps are very important and follow the first step of understanding pictures. When the child begins reading and doesn’t know a word, he needs to say the first sound of the word and keep on reading. The pictures and the meaning of the sentence and oral language order should provide vital clues to work out the unknown word. He is an easy example:

The cat was fr___________by the dog. Most children know that cats are frightened of dogs, this is the child’s  world knowledge. They will also realise without consciousness that the missing word is a verb . Finally, the word must begin with the sound/fr/. If the child uses the three cues they will be able to predict the word before they can actually read it. This is how children begin to read faster!

I have listed a few products below that will be beneficial for young children’s early reading.

Picture Comprehension is presented beautifully in the Introductory Package