Teaching Reading To Your Child
One of the most effective teaching methods for children is to use materials that the child has a natural interest in. Teaching reading to your child is no exception. Our kids (as I’m sure most kids) have a natural interest in animals. Right from the beginning we had great success using their natural curiosity and affection for animals to teach the basic formations and sounds that are associated with the letters and pictures. This naturally progressed into using the same to aid in teaching reading to them as well.
There are several children’s magazines available for you that are dedicated to the animal child connection. As our kids got a bit older we even subscribed to a couple of the magazines for them. You talk about generating an interest! Just wait till the kids realize that every so often the mailman brings them a present. They couldn’t wait and it certainly helped us with teaching reading to both of the kids. If your kids, are struggling to read or maybe struggling to get interested in reading, use a tool that they are naturally interested in. For us, the animal stories and magazines were a great way for us to get started teaching reading.
Find a magazine that seems to fit the age level of your child. For younger children, I recommend one that has big bright colorful pictures with interesting facts. One of our favorite children’s magazines is Zoobooks. Some even have interactive puzzles and games the child can play and learn. A simple search on the internet of “children + animals + magazine” will turn up many choices for you.
Teaching reading to your child is 100 times easier when you employ the use of a subject that children naturally want to know more about. In fact, one thing that we discovered was that once the one of the magazines had been used and was no longer current, they made great tools for the kids to cut some of the pictures out and make bulletin boards, calendars, and it made a great start in getting to the next level of reading by learning to make up their own stories and adventures using the pictures they cut out and the information from the magazines!
Whatever you choice of tools you are considering using to teach reading to your child, I highly recommend the use of some good children’s magazines.
How to improve your reading skills
According to one credible international survey it is said that world’s top 500 most powerful professional have one thing common that their reading speed is more than 500 words per minute. The reading skills is a very a critical factor because this factor is responsible for improving your learning ability. Your ability of reading fast gives you an edge over others. It is an essential skill in present age because your ability of reading fast will master you in large volumes of information quickly and you will take no time in going through pile of papers.
The most important factor about fast reading is that you should be clear in your objective and you should have knowledge on what information you are looking for in a text, books or documents before you start reading them. Let us consider the following situation:
Example: If you want only an outline of the total issue discussed in a text then you need to skim the document and only extract the essential facts out of it. If you want to get the detail in your mind then you read it slowly enough to catch the meaning by going through the important part and leaving out irrelevant details.
What is the reading ability of a common man?
The reading ability of a common man is not more than 130 words per minute. This is because most of us read word by word and silently pronounce these words. This is called Sub Vocalization. But if you want to increase up your reading ability you will have to give up this habit of Sub Vocalization.
First of all you should stop reading word by word and then pronouncing them silently. To enhance your reading skills instead of reading word by word look at group of words and then try to take out meaning from it. It is not so easy but if you continue to practice this art you will master it in one day. And then you will be capable to read a block of words and not any individual word and if the meaning of any previous block is not clear to you then you can move to previous block again.
In case of skilled readers they become habitual of reading block and many words in a block. Also the probability of repeating is least in case of skilled readers. Skilled readers also require only a fraction of second to go through a block.
Thus main guidelines to improve your reading skills are:
- You should concentrate on block of words rather than single word and then try to cover many words in a block.
- You should minimize the time spend in each block.
- You should reduce frequency of moving your eyes backwards to cover the previous block.
