Reading For Children
Be sure it’s fun. Reading is a lifelong task. If the child doesn’t have fun he’ll lose the skills you teach him. David, the child with the big smile in the picture has just read a series of clues and found a ball of silly putty for his efforts. Clearly, to him reading is rewarding. This is one of many games in Rocket Phonics used to link reading with fun.
Each game has a dual purpose: fun and in this case reading immersion. Reading immersion helps David develop sight words. (Words he recognizes by sight and no longer has to sound out.) The more sight words the more fluent a reader he is.
Building Confidence
Can games take a nonreader to independent level? No, probably not, but it can get the child into the rhythm of sounding out the words he doesn’t know and then reading the sentence again for meaning. So when he or she is reading fun children’s stories it is easy enough that they can do it. And more important they have the confidence to try.
This confidence is very important. There are 800,000 words in the English language and no one knows them all. So there will always be a need to sound out a word and discern its meaning from the rest of the sentence. For example, most people don’t know what a “toque blanche” is. But if they read this sentence: The chef stood proudly with his toque blanche atop his head. They could figure out that toque blanche is a chef’s hat.
Fun Is The Fuel Of LifeLong Reading
Fun and confidence are a perfect combination to create lifelong readers, but what is it worth to you? “According to research from Thomas Crowley, 85 percent of self-made millionaires read two or more books per month.” So reading for children helps the parent too. If you want to live better in retirement than Social Security will supply, get your child reading and doing it in his or her free time. John Rampton, the author of the article I just quoted is a millionaire. So if he says reading is a common trait among millionaires he speaks from experience.
If you are interested in Rocket Phonics, which is a reading program where the games teach the reading them click here.