Teach Your Child To Read

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After some interesting queries I decided to write a new blog post to answer, so other people get to see the answer too.

Regarding what age to start – that’s a difficult one! The phonemic awareness games and activities can be started as young as 2 and definitely by 3. They involve purely auditory skills and can be as basic as listening to and identifying environmental sounds, or as complex as generating rhyming strings of words. If your child cannot identify rhyme yet (some children do not acquire this skill until they are 6 or older), read lots of nursery rhymes and rhyming stories, and when they are familiar with them, leave out the second of each rhyming pair of words. All these games help to prepare them for future reading and writing.

Learning the actual letter sounds through phonics instruction can start whenever your child shows interest, and the later you start, usually the quicker they progress as they are more mature and able to remember and concentrate more. I would suggest between 4 and 5, when you can see your child is keen and motivated to learn. Pushing too far too quick usually causes children to slam their own brakes on the learning process. Some children are ready at this age to learn the letter sounds very quickly, various letters each day; others will struggle to remember any letters at one each week. You can still carry on with the activities as long as your child does not feel pressured, discouraged or lose confidence because of this, remember the activities and songs can be repeated week after week for the same letters as well as introducing new ones. Your attitude to their successes and failures sets the scene for them feeling confident and happy or dejected, so especially at this early stage forget your expectations and praise, praise, praise.

Regarding the font used, this is one which is like the handwriting style often taught in the British and American systems, but not in the Spanish system. In the Spanish system the main differences are the letters ‘b’, ‘r’, ‘s’ and ‘z’, and the fact that their letters are generally ‘more cursive’ than this font! Their letters are normally taught with the entrant stroke to the letter already joined as well as the exit ‘flick’. Here are some fonts I have found which are similar to the style of handwriting used in Spanish schools, and as all the worksheets I have produced are in Word format, you could change the font to one of these if you like.

Brush script:
Script MT bold:
French script:
Vladimir Script :

The French script looks to me like the easiest to read, though it does look to me to be even more cursive than the normal handwriting. I am not aware of any particular font which is the same as the handwriting taught in Spain, but I will do a bit of investigation and get back to you on this if I find one! (Just found one which is similar: try searching for Cursive Handwriting at www.fontstock.net – it gives you a trial of a good one.)

Depending on how old your child is and how much they have already been taught, you could just explain that in your country they write some letters differently and ask how does your teacher write this letter? Then when there is one which is different, ask them to choose which way they would like to practise writing it, or practise both ways. For reading, they will have to learn to recognise a variety of different fonts in different books and texts, so learning to recognise letters using a different font is no problem.

Regarding the question about handwriting or neatness, when children are starting to write, their handwriting ability varies very greatly depending on how their fine motor skills are developing. In general they will try to write carefully, but if they don’t, it’s usually because they can’t! To develop good handwriting, they need to have good fine motor skills which are developed by using the muscles in the hands and fingers. You shouldn’t criticise handwriting, but you can make suggestions such as “Try to remember to keep the letters sitting on the line and not floating in the air – they might escape!” and “If you start at this side of the page, and write small letters, you’ll be able to fit your writing on the page better.”  Then to improve handwriting you can do activities which develop these muscles and fine motor skills. Examples are modelling with play dough and plasticine, tearing paper, rolling small pieces of paper into little balls… (Good idea for another post or link for more ideas – I’ll look into it!) In Spain, handwriting is considered an important skill – even more so than in our system, and so they practise much more and in the end have much neater handwriting than a lot of our students!

Hope this helps, any more questions, please feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Related Posts;

1) Welcome to Teach Your Child To Read

2) Fonts For Our Free Phonics Worksheets

3) Sign Up Form (For The Free Worksheets)