Helping Preschool Children Become Readers

This is an extract from Dr. Ann S. Epstein’s article (Helping Preschool Children Become Readers:  Tips for Parents) to enhance your child’s reading experience.

Reading with children will be most beneficial if parents follow these simple techniques:

Be familiar with the book.  If the book is new, parents should try to read it themselves beforehand.

Read slowly bit naturally.  Pronouncing the words carefully helps to build children’s vocabulary.

Read with interest.  An expressive voice shows interest and engages the child.

Use different voices. This helps children differentiate the characters and their qualities.

Use a finger to follow the words.  This shows the connection between spoken and written words.  Children will learn to associate sounds with specific letters ad letter combinations.

Stop reading to talk about the book.  Children want to talk about the pictures, story and characters.  If a book is familiar, they might predict what will happen next or imagine different events and endings.

Extend the reading.  Reading is enriched when children represent the events or characters through drawing and play-acting.  Other ideas include visiting places and doing things that appear in the book or making up stories and games that build on the book’s ideas.

Most of the Pre-Nursery and Nursery children will probably not be decoding the print of the storybooks taken home.  However, we should bear in mind that children “read’ in many ways.  Almost all young children “read” the big and yellow M really well.  Before they read actual words, children pretend to read.  They follow the pictures in a familiar book, tell the story from memory, or make up their own narrative.  With lots of exposure to print material, they come to understand basic print concepts, such as turning the pages from front to back, reading from top to bottom and following lines from left to right.

Below is a list of authors and illustrators of books for young children to help you around in your trip to the library.