How to Learn the ABC's of Reading

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ann Kennedy and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to talk to you about understanding the nature of reading. The ABCs. When should you start introducing the ABCs? Immediately. As I said in other sessions, have ABC posters, vertical and horizontal around the home. Have the ABCs so your child can see it and also show the child how you write the ABCs. If you notice, what I did here is I have a lot of space, you know why? One of the most important things you can do and you don't have to have wonderful printing or wonderful handwriting at this age but what you have to do is when you write the ABC, write it and tell your child could you color this in for me? Children learn more by coloring than almost any other avenue available for learning. Modeling your behavior and coloring so you ask them to color the ABCs. You may want to write and say the ABCs and as you write your ABCs, tell your child watch me and I'm going to make it big enough for you to help me when I'm done and would you mind coloring it in? For example, if your daughter's name is Angela, you would write the word Angela on one sheet of paper and do it this way, just ask your daughter to color it, color her name, even if it's all messy, it's not important, you're starting to teach them the concept of lines, the concept of the alphabet. So you write and say what you do. It's not enough just to go ahead and write it out and not say a word. Write it and say, this is the letter b, this is the letter c as you're writing and say watch me. You're not forcing the child to do anything, just watch me and if they're bored and they don't want to see more than one or two letters, stop, don't push it, just stop. Say okay, we'll finish this up another day. Watch me, color your way to learn the ABCs and then what I like to do which I think is really really beneficial that we're going to go ahead and we're going to create our own ABC chart. Let's just work on a couple letters today. We may only work on a and b, they color that in, tomorrow we'll work on c and d and by the time we're done, we have it all colored, something that we did together and we display it in the child's room. So that's writing your ABCs."