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Category: listening
Help your 3 year old with reading
How to help your 3 year old with reading!
Reading is so important. It connects us to the world and allows us to become independent. So obviously, we want our children to be able to read. And because you’ve clicked on this blog, I’m going to assume you want to know how to support your 3 year old with reading.Â
In previous blogs, I’ve mentioned the importance of not teaching your child letters too young. There’s no evidence that it’s beneficial and can even be detrimental!Â
But I get it, you’re a parent! You want to do the best you possibly can for your child. You want them to have a ‘leg up’ in life. And that feels like it means they need to learn to read as early as possible.Â
Interestingly, recognising letters early doesn’t support with reading and is often focused on to the exclusion of far more important elements. There are so many other things that we can do as parents to support our kids with reading the twill have a much greater impact.Â
If you haven’t already read my blog – how to teach your 2 year old to read – you might want to go and check that out before reading this to find out the fundamentals, but otherwise, let’s dive right in!
Helping 3 year olds with reading.Â
Firstly, carry on with everything you’ve been doing before. All the rhymes, the songs, the conversations, the vocal sounds and the games will be giving your child a fantastic foundation for the next step – blending and segmenting!Â
Even though these are words that are often included when we talk about reading books, it’s so important that our children are able to blend and segment before they’re ever introduced to letters.Â
BlendingÂ
Blending is the process of putting sounds together to make words. When you’re first trying this with your child, keep the words simple and short, and model pushing the sounds together yourself. For example, when you’re at the breakfast table say ‘please can you pass the c-u-p, cup’. By doing this, you’re showing your child how to listen to the individual sounds and push them together.Â
SegmentingÂ
Segmenting is the opposite of blending. It’s breaking words down into their smallest sounds. This is much harder for children to learn. Use short words and start by encouraging them to recognise the initial sound in the word, then challenge them to say the other sounds. Saying the word very slowly can help!!Â
Listening to adults model blending and segmenting is a great way to scaffold learning for our children and will make it easier for them to do later on in their education. Segmenting and blending words here and there during the day will help them to hear each individual sound in words, a much smaller unit of sound than it seems!
ComprehensionÂ
Comprehension of stories should still be being developed, focusing mostly on retelling what has happened with pictures as prompts, such as ‘what happened to Humpty Dumpty?’ and answers to direct questions about what they’ve just read. If you’d like to find out more about what questions to ask to help your child, check out my blog – Demystifying Reading Comprehension – here!!
The most important thing you can do to help your 3 year old learn to read is to talk to, and play with, them! Children learn so much from their parents, and vocabulary is one of the biggest and most important. The average 3 year old knows 450 words, but by 4, they know as many as 1000 words. And the difference? Conversation! The more you talk to your child, the more their vocabulary grows, and the easier they’ll find it to recognise words on paper later on.Â
If you want to support your child further and get more individualised support for both you and your child, check out the Raising Readers Community, where you can learn all about teaching the pillars of reading, how to ensure you’re getting the most out of reading with your child, and how to fit learning into your day with no extra preparation needed from you. Even just a 3 minute activity a day makes a huge difference. Check it out!
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FacebookTwitterLinkedInHelp your 2 year old with reading skills!
Help your 2 year old with reading skills!
We all want our children to have the best advantages in life. That includes asking how you can help your 2 year old with reading. Read on to find out how you can help prepare them to read!
The terrible twos can be a very tricky time for most families, especially when your little one learns the word ‘no’! But it’s also the time that many parents start to think about education and how to give your child the best possible start. How can you teach your 2 year old all the things they need to know?
Reading is one of the most important things that your child will learn. Knowing how to read allows our children to learn so many different things in the future. It gives them independence.Â
But you knew all of that already. You want to know how to teach them when they’re young!
Evidence shows that learning letters early has little to no impact on a child’s ability to read later on, and in fact, can be detrimental and leave them struggling. Instead, children need to develop the skills for reading.Â
For some children, this comes naturally over time. For most, it needs to be taught.Â
Which sounds scary. It sounds like a lot of work. It sounds like you need to be giving your child that ‘instagram lifestyle’ in order for them to be alright. Which is rubbish. No one actually has that life that we see on instagram (I certainly don’t!)
There are loads of ways that we can be teaching our children reading skills in ways that don’t cause us extra stress. In fact, you might find that you’re doing most of them already!Â
Things you can do to help your 2 year old learn reading skills
Listening GamesÂ
I’ve written a whole blog on this here – 10 listening games that will help your child learn to read – but the essence of it is that reading requires children to be able to hear small units of sounds in words and blend the sounds together. By developing your child’s listening skills, you’re making it easier for them to identify sounds in smaller and smaller units, leading to them finding it easy to recognise them in words. (This also helps with segmenting words for spelling as your child can hear each individual sound more easily).
Starting to listen for more sounds in their environment is the first step towards recognising small units of sound in words, so try to take a moment’s breather and encourage your child to listen to the world around them and see how many different things they can identify. If you want more help with this, have a look at my 10 reading activities and sign up for my newsletter where I regularly send tips for reading!
Build VocabularyÂ
The average 3 year old already knows 450 words. By the time a child is 4 they know on average 1000 words! The wider a child’s vocabulary, the easier it is for them to work out words on a page and understand what they are reading.
There are lots of ways to develop a child’s vocabulary. I’ve listed a few example games below and am working on a more comprehensive list! If you want to be notified when it comes out, you can sign up for my mailing list here.
- using interesting words around the house – try to use less common words when you’re playing with your children. Exposing the to a variety of words that mean the same thing will help their vocabulary grow, but remember, it takes 4-12 times hearing a new word before a child learns it! Some examples of words you could use are
- immaculate when something is clean
- marvellous or wonderful instead of good
- delicious or scrumptious instead of yummy
- Categories – choose a category and list all of the things you can think of in this. The category could be anything, from kitchen objects to types of clothing. When you run out of objects, choose another category! This is an easy game you can play anywhere. While your 2 year old might run out of options quite quickly, as they get used to playing this game, they’ll find it easier to think of more and grow their vocabulary within that category!
- This one builds on the last game. Encourage your child to build descriptors that match a category. For example, if your category is animals, challenge your child to explain what the animal does as well as what it is. What does the animal do? – A bird flies, a dog ___
Nursery Rhymes
Again, I’ve written a longer blog on this here – Do nursery rhymes help our children? – but nursery rhymes are incredibly helpful for teaching our children to read. Repetition, use of gesture and exploration of rhythm and rhyme all help our children to build their vocabulary, helping them to make links between words and their meanings. They also build our children’s attention spans, social skills and their understanding of the world!
Controlling our Voices
Voice control helps our children with making smaller and smaller units of sound, which they will later use to sound out words and blend them together. We can help our children develop this in a variety of ways
- making sounds when our children are playing, such as ‘weee’ when they go down a slide
- singing songs and nursery rhymes
- say words in different ways, fast, slow, differences in pitch etc.
- making animal sounds
Enjoying storiesÂ
Reading to your child every day helps to develop all of the above and is the most important part of helping your child learn to read at this age. Exposing your child to stories helps them build listening skills, attention, social skills and comprehension. Whether it’s you reading to your child personally, or giving them access to audio books, experiencing books and stories is the most important thing your child can do to become a good reader later on!
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If you want to support your child further and get more individualised support for both you and your child, check out the Raising Readers Community, where you can learn all about teaching the pillars of reading, how to ensure you’re getting the most out of reading with your child, and how to fit learning into your day with no extra preparation needed from you. Even just a 3 minute activity a day makes a huge difference. Check it out!
- using interesting words around the house – try to use less common words when you’re playing with your children. Exposing the to a variety of words that mean the same thing will help their vocabulary grow, but remember, it takes 4-12 times hearing a new word before a child learns it! Some examples of words you could use are
Do Nursery Rhymes help our children?
How do Nursery Rhymes help our children learn?
Do nursery rhymes help your child to learn?Â
I’ll answer this question quickly. Nursery rhymes help our children learn so many things!
Tell the truth, how many times have you sung ‘Incy wincy spider’ in your lifetime? If you’re a parent, it probably feels like the rhyme is permanently playing in the back of your head! There’s bound to be at least one that makes you think ‘If I never hear that one again, it’ll be too soon!’Â
Firstly, I completely know the feeling (I was leading Nursery when the whole Baby Shark craze happened. Every single child wanted nothing more than to listen to that song on repeat all day long. I honestly think it’s still the sound track to my dreams!).Â
However, while we may get sick of them sometimes, singing nursery rhymes is one of the best things you can do to help your child develop reading skills.Â
Did you know that the number of nursery rhymes a child knows has an impact on how well they read when they’re older?
“Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.’
Below I’ve broken down how nursery rhymes help into sections and a few ways you can make them more engaging for your child, and less repetitive for you!
How do nursery rhymes help?
When our children are very young, their attention spans are tiny. Sitting and ‘learning’ for prolonged periods of time just isn’t possible for them (even when they reach year 1 their attention spans only stretch to around 15 minutes!). Nursery rhymes offer short, bite-sized bursts of essentially ‘intensive learning’. Repetition of these rhymes also helps children develop their working memory. So those thousand repetitions of Twinkle Twinkle are actually hugely valuable!
They help children develop key skills and can inspire open-ended play where our kids can learn even more, following their own interests!
Language and communication skills
Starting from before birth children start to acquire language by listening to those around them. Nursery rhymes help by:
- engaging their listening skills and helps them focus on the rhythm, helping them develop an understanding of language and speech patterns.
- Saying nursery rhymes help children to develop their mouth and tongue muscles, helping them to say the sounds correctly.
- Increases vocabulary with words our children may not regularly hear (such as spout in incy wincy spider).
- Acting out the nursery rhymes helps children recognise and remember words they haven’t come across before (including things like directional words (up above in Twinkle Twinkle)
Social skills and Understanding the world
Nursery rhymes help to develop social skills, from working in pairs (row your boat), to recognising humour (animal fair), knowing nursery rhymes can help your child interact with others and provide comfort to themselves when they’re in uncomfortable situations.
- Nursery rhymes are a staple, they can be sung anywhere and most people know them.
- The connection between rhythm, the words and actions can make these rhymes a great group activity. Children work as a group and create a sense of belonging.
- Using rhymes can build connections between the person singing and the child, it can be incredibly soothing for your child to listen to you sing (even if you can’t carry a tune in a bucket!)
- It’s a good way to build connections between multiple generations. We’re still singing the same nursery rhymes our Grandparents sang!
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Literacy skills
As I said above, nursery rhymes have been linked to reading skills and development, and it’s easy to see why! Nursery rhymes teach children so many skills that have a direct impact on reading.
- They develop listening skills and sound recognition, helping children to hear sounds in words.
- Introduce rhyming words, enabling children to listen to word endings and begin to link words that sound similar.
- Story structure – Beginning, middle and end of stories (like Little Miss Muffet)
- They introduce alliteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia and imagery.
- Recognising the rhythm of the rhymes, which helps children work out words when they start reading.
How can you make nursery rhymes more engaging for your child and less repetitive for you?
- Sing slowly and clearly
- Include actions and expression – this helps your child develop their fine and gross motor skills, making writing easier!
- Involve your child – miss words at the end of lines and see if you child can fill in the blanks. When your child is good at this, you could change the word and see if your child can come up with a fitting rhyming word.
- Encourage your child to find things in the environment to help them
- Get your child to act out the nursery rhymes. This helps children develop their imagination and creativity and link actions to words.
- Sing a broader range of nursery rhymes!
If you’re anything like me, the same few get stuck in your head and you can’t for the life of you think of any others. That’s why I’ve put together a list of nursery rhymes that can be found here – Nursery rhyme master list – that includes audios for you to listen to (great if you particularly hate singing!).
If you want to find out more about how to help your little one develop reading skills before they start school, you can download my free activities here – 10 reading activities before ABC – and sign up to my mailing list to get my weekly newsletter that includes additional tips and tricks to help with reading!Â
If you want to support your child further and get more individualised support for both you and your child, check out the Raising Readers Community, where you can learn all about teaching the pillars of reading, how to ensure you’re getting the most out of reading with your child, and how to fit learning into your day with no extra preparation needed from you. Even just a 3 minute activity a day makes a huge difference. Check it out!
Learn to read – 10 listening games that will help your child
10 Listening Games
that will help your child learn to read
Want some fun and easy activities that will help your child learn to listen? Below are 10 activities you can do with your child that will not only develop listening, but also skills that will help your child learn to read!
Why listening skills help children learn to read
Before your child can learn to read, they need to build several foundational skills. Reading involves hearing, distinguishing, and blending small units of sound. Essentially, your child needs to be able to listen in order to read!
Now, I can’t promise your child will always listen to you (I don’t think anyone in the world could promise that!), but I’ve come up with 6 games you can play with your child that will also help them develop their social skills, make sense of the world around them and build their vocabulary.
Playing one of these games for just 5 to 10 minutes each day can make a massive difference to your little one’s ability to listen and concentrate.
10 listening games that will help your child learn to read
1. Sound hunt
I like to do this one when on a walk but it could be done inside just as easily. Encourage your child to listen for as many things as they can, and tell you what they hear. If you have an older child, get them to describe it and add details. If you’re doing this on a walk, you could do it each day and see how the sounds change. It can be fun to use a piece of paper to record everything you hear, but it’s not necessary.Â
2. Red light Green Light
A great game to play outside. Tell your child that they’re going to pretend to be a car. When you say ‘red light’ they need to stop, like a car at the traffic lights. When you say ‘green light’ they can run again.Â
Get your child to run around and periodically shout red/green light. This is great for multi directional attention as your child has to concentrate on where they’re going as well as listening to you. It also helps them burn some energy, which is never a bad thing!Â
This game could also be played with music (Musical statues) which would require your child to listen to something different. This can be great for encouraging children to understand the rhythm in music too! (There’s always that one moment when it’s gone quiet but you haven’t paused the music!)
3. What sound?Â
Children love this game as it involves being blindfolded! I find using an eye mask is the best way to play this game, but if you don’t have that you could always use a scarf or just get your child to cover their eyes (make sure they’re not peaking though!)
Get them to listen very carefully and then make a sound in your house. It could be ringing the doorbell, running water from the tap, or turning on a light. Encourage your child to name the sound you just made. This helps them identify the world around them and can help if your little one is nervous of noises in the night too, as they may find it easier to identify them!Â
You could then switch roles (if you have nerves of steel and trust your child to be sensible while you’re blindfolded!) and get your child to make a noise for you to identify.Â
4. I spy
I spy is one of my all time favourite games for kids because it can be used in so many different ways! The classic game is when you spy something that begins with a certain letter (I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S), but you can adapt it to be a listening game too.
Instead of saying a letter, describe what you’re seeing. Your child needs to listen to what you’re saying and see if they can guess what it is. This builds vocabulary and pattern recognition as well as listening skills as your child has to make sense of what you’re saying and match it to what they’re seeing.
I spy with my little eye, something that is green and has leaves.
With this example, it could be a bush or a tree, or a plant. You could keep giving more a more detailed description until your child works it out.
5. Simon Says
Another old favourite, you probably played this at school when your teacher needed a small break (I know I certainly used it like that!). It’s fantastic at getting children to concentrate on what you’re saying. They need to work out whether they should follow the instruction and what they need to do.Â
Explain to your child that you’re going to give them some instructions, but they should only do it if they hear the phrase ‘Simon says’.Â
- Simon says touch your nose  (your child touches their nose)
- Touch your nose (if your child touches their nose, say, ‘oops! I didn’t say, Simon Says!’)
This can be a hard one for children to understand at first, so don’t worry if they don’t get it straight away. Once they get the hang of it it often results in lots of giggling, particularly if you can get other family members involved and they get it wrong! As your child gets more used to this game, you could start to give more detailed instructions, such as ‘Simon says jump for 10 seconds’, or ‘touch your right ear with your right hand’.Â
6. Copy cat game
Exactly like it sounds, to play this game, you do something and your child copies you! This could be sentences or words, or actions. For example, you could clap a rhythm, jump around the room, or stick out your tongue, and your child has to copy you. To make it a listening game, all you need to do is add sounds. Make sounds by drumming, stamping, or using your voice and encourage your child to copy, exactly as you did it. This helps them listen closely to what you are doing and have a go themselves. Not only does this build listening skills, but vocal skills too, which will help them to blend together sounds to make words later on!Â
7. Did I get it?Â
Similar to the previous game, this one asks your child to take the lead. You could tell them they need to be the parent or the teacher and you’re going to practice listening to them.
Ask the child to tell you something to say. Model listening carefully to your child and copy what they said.
- Child:Â Pretty pink unicorn
- You:Â Pretty pink unicorn
Then ask your child if you got it right. When they’ve had a few goes at this, start getting your part a bit wrong.
- Child:Â cat on the table
- You:Â cat on the mat
Ask your child if you got it right. Encourage them to say what you got wrong. I’ve found most children love correcting adults and it helps them listen carefully to what you say!Â
8. The Whisper Game
This is the only game that requires more than two people to play. It could be done at the dinner table the the whole family is together. Start by telling your little one a word and get them to whisper it to the next person. The last person to hear the word tells the whole table. See how much it’s changed!Â
To make it harder, you could try whispering short phrases or even whole sentences! The better everyone around the table listens (I’m looking at you, Uncle Jim!) the better the phrase will come out again. And if it goes wrong, it generally ends in giggles and laughter, so that’s good too!Â
9. Drawing Instructions
All you need is a paper and pencil for this game. Sit your child down and give them instructions on what to draw. If your child is little, start with very simple instructions.
- Draw a circle.
- Put a smily face in it.
If your child is a bit older, you could include descriptive words and time words as well to make it a bit harder.
- Draw a large circle.Â
- Put two small circles inside it, next to each other.
- Draw a curved line near the bottom of the circle.
It doesn’t matter how the picture turns out, only that your child followed the instructions! I love playing this game in my classroom and seeing how each child has interpreted my instructions differently. We can make some really amazing pieces of abstract art that way!Â
10. Praise good listening
Okay, so this final one isn’t so much a game as it is a habit, but it’s the most valuable one. When they’ve done a good job at listening, try to use specific praise. This lets your child know exactly what they did that you liked and makes them more likely to try to do it again.
Try phrases like:
- Well done for listening carefully to the instructions.
- You concentrated really hard on the sounds, that’s brilliant!Â
- What good listening you did today!
I hope you’ve found these games helpful and discovered some new ways to encourage listening in your child. Feel free to comment below with your favourite game or any other games you love playing! You can get even more games and activities to help your child develop reading skills by downloading my free pdf – 10 reading activities before ABCÂ
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