Have you ever come across children who can speak so well and articulately? I’m always amazed by those kids. Most of these children are not gifted. They are pretty much ordinary but they have one common factor. They are surrounded by adults who speak to them properly. It’s a simple…

One of my lecturers who taught us early childhood said that giving very young children a pencil to write will not help them. In fact, it will be bad for them. I don’t know to what extent it is true, or whether it is supported by studies, but over time,…

  There are many materials available to teach reading. While many paid programs and materials are good, there are also quality materials and resources offered for free. Insya’Allah I will keep on updating as I find more free resources. Here is a list that I have compiled for easy reference:…

  The main goal of teaching your kids reading is to ultimately help them understand the text. Good readers are better at making sense of what they read. According to Sadoski (2004), there are different levels of comprehension: Literal– direct meaning (e.g. the first little pig built a house of…

Phonics is where real reading begins. This is the stage where your child will begin to decode the spellings of printed words and sound it out. Decoding words require your child to be able to have good: Alphabet Knowledge Phonological Awareness So, if you wonder why your child finds it…

  “B-u-s. What word is that?” *Your child stares at you cluelessly.* Does this sound familiar? So your child knows most of the sounds in the alphabet and you’re ready to teach him to blend those sounds. But when you tried sounding out each letter for him to blend, he…

Have you ever wondered whether you should follow the advice of introducing your kids with letter sounds before letter names? Or why some reading programs don’t start teaching letters from the normal sequence of A to Z, instead they start with “s, a, t, p..”? Or whether you should introduce…

I’m sure by now you realize that there are a ton of information and so many reading programs to choose from. They all seem to be using various approach to teaching reading. This overwhelming amount of info can leave you a little clueless on where to start or which program…

“The cat is on the mat” What seems like a no-brainer to us adults, is not quite so for children. Reading is no easy task for them. It involves working together with a set of complex skills from visual to auditory processing. Reading this simple sentence, for example, requires your…