Every child learns to read.
Some children find reading easy; they can already read their 1st grade spelling words.
Other children find learning to read incredibly difficult and it is a laborious process.
Some children have a very easy access to the characters, others find it incredibly difficult. Find out how to teach your child to read here.
Which developmental cycle is “normal” here and in which cases should you take a closer look?
How do I, as a parent, deal with the fact that my child shows little interest in reading and also finds it very difficult?
These and other questions will be answered in the following.
How does learning to read work?
Every child has learned to speak. A spoken word is associated with a certain object, an action or something else. When you hear the word banana, you think of the yellow, crooked, sweet fruit. “I want a banana.”, means your child wants to eat a banana now.
With the help of language – words – your child was able to communicate and perceive his environment for several years. Now your child is gradually learning that this spoken language can also be represented in written language (written language) in the form of a word picture.
Often, the first conscious perception takes place in the written image of one’s own name. In addition to the already familiar process of speaking, your child is confronted with a new challenge.
Suddenly a banana doesn’t just look yellow and crooked, it also suddenly looks like this: BANANE. Your child understands that it is also possible to express already quite familiar everyday objects and actions in a different form – the written form.
Of course, this does not happen overnight. This process takes time and your patience.
Teaching your child to read – patience is the key to success.
This patience is sometimes hard to come by. But for your child, it is quite important that you believe in the development process and also accept the one or other setback without losing patience.
You can read more about how to do this here: https://argoprep.com/blog/first-grade-sight-words-list-and-basics/.
How a little girl learned to read and what you can learn from it
I want to tell you about a little girl. She is 7 years old and has been going to school for a good two months. She is having a lot of fun so far. She especially likes art and math.
Reading is a completely different story.
A typical German lesson: All the children have opened the primer to page 16. The teacher stands in front and takes children one by one to read two to three of the next words. The children follow along word by word with their fingers.
“Great job, Tobias. Frank, please keep going.” The little girl sits there thinking, “I hope I don’t get my turn. I’ll never, ever get it as good as the others.
She finds reading very difficult. She already knows many individual sounds, but swinging them together into syllables and then into whole words is a very laborious process for her.
When parents are suddenly in charge
The teacher has already noticed this and told her mom in a parent-teacher meeting. She should practic
e reading with her child at home. The child simply had to practice more and have a list of first grade sight words. The mother is always alone with the children during the week – the girl has two older sisters. The father works as an assembly worker, so he is always away somewhere in Germany during the week.
Learning to read was easy for the sisters, the mother thinks to herself. Why is it so hard for my youngest daughter? But during the week – when her father is not at home – she hardly has time to take care of it. So the father takes over when he comes home from work on Friday.
He is exhausted. The week was exhausting for him. His mother tells him about the conversation with the teacher. The father calls up the stairs. “Come downstairs with your primer.”
Together, child and father sit in the living room. The father on the armchair and the child on the stool next to it. Word by word, both have gone through the current exercise page. The girl tries to read the words one after the other, the dad sits next to her with a mixture of nodding and groaning.
If a word didn’t work, he recited it rather quickly, since there were other things to do than read here now. When the girl could not remember the word “and” even after 3 times, the father had little understanding for it. “That was already quite often. You have to remember that.” But it didn’t work.
After 10 to 15 minutes, both were freed from this procedure. Until the next time.