Teaching Your Child To Read With Classroom Teaching Resources

By Author: Virgil Campbell
Total Articles: 11
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It doesn’t matter how quickly your child develops, you can help your child’s skills by maintaining a keen interest in spelling, reading and the sounds of words.

Babies, Toddlers and Preschool
Reading to your child is important; they take in more sights and sounds than you imagine. Pictures are important, so divert from the written words to maintain interest. Point at pictures and relate them to real life situations: “Look at that big dog, it looks like Granddad’s dog!” Even as a baby, your child will learn to relate pictures to the story.
Your child may even learn what sounds letters make before school. Teaching the alphabet and the sound each letter makes will help your child’s reading journey.

Key Stage 1
The more you read for and with your child, the more interest they will have in reading. Allow your child to choose books which appeal to them, the enjoyment of reading will help to advance their skills.

The balance between the number of words which you read for your child and the number of words your child reads will depend on the difficulty of the reading material and ...
... the child’s reading level. Point to each word as it is read and gradually increase the percentage of words your child reads.
Your child is likely to be familiar with the sound letters make from school. Use the ‘hard sounds’ at first, “ah” “buh” and “cuh”; before moving on to “ay”, “be” and “see”, and the connection between the two “big ah (A) and little ay (a)”. Ask your child to spell his/her name using these letter sounds, and when reading point out the letter sounds in words “cuh for cat”. Eventually, you can progress on to the phonetics of letter combinations such as “oo”, “ch”, “sh”, “ai” and “ee”. Comparing words to what they sound like, such as “it begins with h and rhymes with cat”, and discussing rhyming words can also develop phonetics.

Vowel digraphs can add interest to learning two letter combination phonetics (a method advised in Government guidelines). Classroom teaching resources aren’t only for the classroom, after all. Decorate walls near your reading area with inexpensive vowel digraphs in fun and colourful designs featuring flowers, insects or animals, and point at them and encourage your child to pronounce its sound and think of a word which contains the sound.

Of course, some words aren’t phonetically spelt. Short words like “he”, “she” and “the” can be learnt by heart and you may find primary teaching resources useful for lists of short tricky words.

Don’t be harsh on your child if they use a word which has the right meaning but is spelt completely differently; “wash” instead of “clean”, for example. This shows your child understands the meaning of the story, which is just as important as reading the words. You can check your child is paying attention and understand by discussing the plot, “what do you think will happen next?”
Professional classroom teaching resources add variety to reading sessions. Colourful and attractive designs will keep things interesting and fresh and enable you to ask your child questions about words, spellings and sounds. A good selection of primary teaching resources in the home can make all the difference to learning to read. Vowel digraphs, words containing common letter combinations and non-phonetic short word lists are fun and educational learning tools your child will enjoy.

Sweet Counter offer a wide range of teaching resources which are ideal for the classroom and home. Browse fun and colourful wall charts, playground pictures and downloads which can help boost literacy, numeracy and language skills.
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