Pictures & Phonics in Teaching Kids to Read

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ann Kennedy on behalf of Expert Village and I'll be teaching you some steps to teach a child to read. There's more to reading than just sitting down and reading a book. There's pictures and phonics, sounds outs and meanings. One of the most important things you can do with your child is to look at a picture. You may know that that's a kitty cat but say it. Cat. That's the first thing you do is to look at the picture. That's a ball. And that's a doggie, or a dog. Is it important to write it? Yes, but there's another little way to write and to come up with the sounds. To start, let's start writing cat with the letter c. If you notice, I said what the letter was. The child watched me write the letter. Now this is phonemic awareness. That's why rhymes are so important. Instead of just writing a t, we're going to begin teaching children about syllables, phonemic awareness, everything that it's going to take for them to learn to decode and read so we're going to go c, kuh, and write these two letters together, at, and look Angela, these two letters form the sound at and this c is kuh so together we put the letters and we have the word kuh at. Can you say it with me? Get your mouth ready. Kuh at. We're going to do the same thing with the word ball. We're not going to just write ball. It won't mean anything but instead let's write the letter b, get your mouth ready, buh, and then we'll write the two letters together, al. Isn't that wonderful that letters can create sounds and those sounds can create words so look at the picture, let your child witness seeing you write the word and write it in a way that you're breaking it up into sounds, simple sounds, kuh at. So there is more to reading than just reading a story."