Category: vocal skills

  • Help 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. 

    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. 

    For some children, this comes naturally over time. For most, it needs to be taught. 

    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! 

    Things you can do to help your 2 year old learn reading skills

    Listening Games 

    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 Vocabulary 

    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 stories 

    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!

     

    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!

  • Do Nursery Rhymes help our children?

    How do Nursery Rhymes help our children learn?

    Do nursery rhymes help your child to learn? 

    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!’ 

    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!). 

    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. 

    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!

     

    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! 

    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!