Starter reading words?

Question

I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good starting words for learning how to read for kids. My son is 4 and i'm going to start to teaching him to read he knows words like apple and yoyo. And some ways to help make it fun for him. Thanks

Answer 1

It's wonderful that you are already concerned about your child's education.  Success and confidence in school starts in preschool. It's during these early years that children begin to develop foundation skills that lead to either excellence or just 'getting by' in school.

The words that you are looking for are called Sight Words.  They are words that don't follow the phonemic rules.  Basically the only way to learn them is to memorize, so flashcards work great.  However, I agree with a previous comment of posting words around the house.  That's called a print-rich enviornment and many teachers use it to help the students read and spell words correctly.  It would help to post a few words here and there (you can always take them off when your child has learned them so you don;t have cards everywhere).  

However, you might want to teach your child a letter a week along with its sound, since that will help them later on in school when they have to decode words.  

Other ideas to help in reading are:

Dolls/Puppets - Help your children with reading comprehension by acting out the stories in books. The hands on experience may spark an understanding of the literature and help develop verbal comprehension skills. Young childrem enjoy this sort of preschool reading activity and develop a love for reading as a result.

Blocks - Blocks are fantastic educational tools. They can be used to show basic pre-math concepts, such as greater or less than, or if they have the alphabet printed on them, teach children letter recognition. You and your child can create an entertaining preschool reading activity together!

Magazines - Take a bunch of old magazines and cut out similar pictures and then put them into sets, mixing and matching pictures whose names rhyme with one another.

Also, when you read to him/her, teach that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. They learn that pages are turned from left to right, and are read from top to bottom. Preschool reading level children often show a desire to gain reading skill by holding a book and pretending to read it.

Have fun learning together!

Answer 2

Hooked on Phonics worked well for my son.  It begins with letter sounds and has them reading pretty quickly a little story so they can feel proud and be motivatied.  Plus it came with charts that you put stickers on to chart your progress.  My son loved it! But if you are just wanting to start without a program...

Make some flip books.  Take a piece of poster board and cut it to like 2" X 5" then take either the same poster board or card stock and make pages that are 2" X 2".  Punch holes in each page to put a ring through.  Each book should have an early blend.

Example: Large back page PAT, smaller flip pages to cover the P and have m, s, f, c, b, v, r, and t to make mat, sat, fat, cat, bat, vat, rat, tat

other blends to start with are AN (pan, can, Jan), AR (car, far, bar), ET (wet, bet, met), EN (hen, pen, men), AD (had, pad, mad), IT (it, sit, fit), OP (hop, bop, top)

Here is a good website that has downloadable readers that will begin with letter sounds and go all the way through about 2nd grade.  It is $80 per year, but is well worth it if you have an early reader you want to encourage.  These are the same kinds of books they us in the schools.

http://www.readinga-z.com/index.php

Hope this helps.  Good Luck!

Answer 3

The best way to teach him to read is by reading and letting him follow what you're reading.  Run your finger along the line as you read.  Use some of the very easy little books with a small vocabulary & some repetition & lovely pictures.

If you let him choose which one to read each time you'll find you're repeating the books he likes and he is more likely to start picking up which word you are reading.  He will also learn the story and start repeating it.  & at that stage he'll begin to realise that the same combinations of letters appear everytime you say a certain word.

Words in context have more meaning for the child starting to read than isolated words on cards.

Reading is really quite complex.  The child needs to learn that the strange marks can stand for words & ideas before they break the code of the letters & combinations.

Answer 4

They're called sight words and you can usually find sight word vocab flash cards at stores like walgreens, even the dollar store!  I bought sight word flash cards for my kids (stocking stuffers) they have character ones, ones where the word's a puzzle (three cards to put the word together with the picture as the identifying clue).  Also, a great game to play is Boggle Jr.  The game consists of three and four letter words that your child has to make (using a card with the word spelled out and a pic to identify the word).  Predictable books (those with repetitive phrases) are also great for him to begin reading!

Answer 5

I put tags on everything around the House and he had to spell the words for me when he asked for something..Like label the chair and when he cleans up from dinner ask him to push in his c-h-a-i-r.....And I announced every time we pulled in or out of the drive way..Here we are at 672 State S-t-a-t-e (not my real address)..lol..Spell out loud often as you can..Like Are you petting the C-A-T?..That makes it fun..Enjoy..s

Answer 6

cat, bat, dog, run, fun, ect.

Answer 7

states, animals, colors, sports words, anything that you can maybe find or make flash cards of. Just make silly games outta it. They'll have fun and learn at the same time.

apple, orange, banana, ...

red, blue, yellow, black, ......

ball, bat, .....

Answer 8

i teach prek and we start with blends and 3 lettes words so we would teach the vowles and their sounds first. then add the consonants...

then add them together.

ca equals "ca" + t= cat

then ca plus n = can

then ca plus b = cab

then ca plus p = cap

then switch the blend to cu or ba, etc.

good luck! SD

Answer 9

small words that would have a picture to go along with.. my daughter learned how to read that way. it goes along with recognition i do believe.

Answer 10

my sister is 4 and she could barely read letters a s g y h .... um  lost count.

Answer 11

Good for you. Get some Dr. Seuss books. He made sight words fun.

Answer 12

You should teach your child the words of the highest frequency first like: one, me , cat , you, all, we, sing etc. Then teach the harder words like apple and yo yo. To make if fun is that you inc operate words in games and learn about 8 to 10 words each week. Kids below 5's memories and learning abilities are like that, they only can learn a little at a time.

Answer 13

There are several websites with the Dolch site word list. It's a list of like 300 words that one should eventually be able to read fluently.  I think that even in college level textbooks 70% of the words are from the dolch list.  It is usually arranged with 3 different difficulty levels.

One thing to keep in mind is that kids will learn to read better using actual books than just calling out random words ona  list or a card.  Try to locate some books that are very repetitive.  We go up.  We go down.  We go in. We go home, etc.   Emerging readers will start to pick up the pattern and will read the "we go" and learn that faster than they would if they just read it off of a card.  They will also learn to use the pictures to help them figure out what the other word on the page is.  It's an important skill.

Anyway I could go on and on but I hope this helps get you started.

Answer 14

Get "Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"

http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-R...

Wonderful book!

Answer 15

When my kids started reading, I got a set of "Bob" books.  They are very simple with only one or two words per page (like cat, sat, etc.) to begin with.  At first kids memorize them but eventually connect the letters with the sounds and actually read.  They come in a little box (I think there were 9 or 12 little books).  As they advance, then there are complete sentences on each page.  Of course, that was a few years ago and I'm sure there are many new starter book sets out there.  My daughter was 4 when she learned to read.  I also read to her a lot from when she was an infant, so she developed a love for books.

Answer 16

Teach her the alphabet sounds and then try to connect 3 letter words; c-a-t  cat, s-a-t sat, also give her some phonetics ending like -at, -ag,-ar,-an,-ap,etc...Put some letters on this phonetics ending; like t+ag=tag, b+at=bat, etc...Then you can give more and more..Children at this age are clever to recognized the words. So I advise you to teach the alphabet sounds not by word recognition. Through this they will be able to read little by little. Good luck!

Answer 17

I'm a Montessori teacher. We always begin with 3 letter phonetical words, like sit, dog, cat, mat, etc.

You should focus on the letters that the child knows best and work with different words from the combination of these letters. For instance, if the child knows the letters a, m, n, p, t, and c, you can work with the words man, can, pan, mat, man, map, nap, tap, etc. You gradually add more letters and more combinations.