Your Child Learns To Read From Birth

Encouraging your child to read is one of the greatest gifts you can give them next to life itself. A child that can read is more confident, learns well, and can amuse themselves for hours. But the question I am asked the most is when do you start to teach your child to read.

Basically you do encourage this from birth. A child that is growing up in an environment where the love and respect for books is encouraged, will feel the same way. Their own natural curiosity will prompt them to try and 'do what you are doing' and this is setting the seeds for their reading proper. I read to my daughter while she was in the womb, I read to her when I was breast-feeding, I read for myself every chance I got. My lounge had a large bookcase, my daughter was bought up in a world of books.

She started to read herself at the age of three. This made writing and numbers skills this much easier to encourage, and she was well on her way to learning by the time she went to school.

Some people feel that books are outdated because of the advent of computers and videos. 'Children have a short attention span', is a common catch-cry. But it does not have to be that way. Books still provide the best resource (I feel) for learning materials, ever produced. A child will learn from a CD-ROM but it will be rote learning. A child can tell you quite happily something they have learnt from a video they have seen, but again they are not learning how to learn.

Many smaller children can actually get 'stressed' from the multitude of images that come with many of the computer games out now. While children do need to have their minds stimulated, to encourage growth and learning, they can suffer quite badly from over stimulation. Large picture books for small children, allow them to view things at their own pace. It also encourages them to question, and start to tell their own story. Children that are read to regularly will quickly develop a favorite book, and while it may seem boring to your to read and re-read the same thing over and over again, for the children it is reinforcing their feelings of security. They know what is coming next, they will join in and even correct you if you change the story. This is all part of their learning process, it is all one step closer to their reading for themselves.

Other things you can do in your daily activities include reading road signs, advertising slogans and product names. You can do this while you take your youngster shopping, going for a drive, or walking anywhere. This simply reinforces for them that words are everywhere, and as they learn these words, they feel a little more in control of their world.