You might not think that illiteracy is a problem in America, but there are 32 million people in America that can’t read.

Learning how to teach kids to read is the best thing you can do to help decrease the number of people in America that can’t read.

Whether you’re a parent or an educator or both, you can do your part to make sure kids can read. Continue this article to learn how to teach someone to read.

Sounds, Letters, and Syllables

You’ve likely heard of and even used the phonics method of teaching kids to read. This method teaches children to read through the relationship between individual sounds and letters in order to allow children to figure out words on their own.

Children look at the word and learn how to match the letters with the sounds. This method starts with the basics of reading and then widens the picture children get with reading so they can learn more and develop their reading skills even further.

When you use this method, you’ll be able to teach a child how to figure out a word, even if they have to learn the meaning of it later.

As a teacher, you will have to understand that the sound of a letter may differ depending on the language that you’re teaching. If you only teach reading in one language, you won’t likely mistake these sounds, but if you’re teaching multiple languages, it’s important to note.

You can use rhyming with this method, which is a fun way to show children there are words with the same ending and sound. Once they start realizing this, it will be a lot easier for them to look at words and know the sound right away.

Word families are a good way to allow children to chunk the information they are learning to make it easier and easier to notice how words sound and what they are likely to mean.

Look and Say

The look and say way to teach children how to read doesn’t worry about breaking down the words into sounds before reading. You link the whole word to the meaning of the word.

This method of learning relies on the child’s visual memory to learn how to read because they have to recognize the shape of the word and recognize the look of the word in order to read it.

If this is the only method you use to teach children how to read, it is easy for children to get lost when they are reading unfamiliar words.

The look and say way to teach is good for words that don’t go along with the phonetic rules. Combining both ways to teach will help children be able to recognize the words that don’t follow the rules and be able to figure out the ones that do.

If the language you are teaching has a lot of irregular sounds, you might want to choose this method over trying to figure out the sounds in the word.

Language Experience

When you teach through language experience, you allow children to learn by reading about their own life in their own words.

Instead of learning about parts of words and letters, they learn about whole words and sentences.

This method allows children to experience their life, talk about what happens, write down what happens in, and then read what they wrote.

Since the children find the words relevant to their life, they are much more likely to be interested in learning to write and read, which can make your job as a teacher much easier.

Which Way Works Best for You?

When you’re working with emergent readers, you aren’t looking for the best way to teach kids to read. You are looking for what is best for you and the child.

How do you teach best, and how do they learn best? When you can find a method that works for you both, you’ll find your child begins to soar with reading.

You’re likely to find that just one way isn’t going to be enough to teach your child how to read. Even if you’re a good reader, you might find it difficult to teach someone how to read.

We dare go as far as to say that if you’re good at reading, you might find it more difficult to teach people to read. When something comes easy to you, it’s hard to figure out ways to break things down in a way that is easy to understand.

If you find yourself struggling to teach children to read, use the above methods in combination to see what the children are responding to. Notice where they might be getting frustrated and ask questions about why they think they aren’t able to understand what you are teaching.

Never assume that a child isn’t good at reading. Assume you haven’t yet found the way to communicate the lesson to them so they can learn it.

How to Teach Kids to Read for Increased Literacy

Now you know how to teach kids to read and can help America increase its number of literate residents.

Having the ability to read and write is very empowering and will open doors for people that might not have otherwise had an opportunity.