Teach Your Child to Read Without Using Words

You can teach your child to read.  There are several pre-readings skills your child should learn first to become a great reader. You don't need to begin teaching your child to read by using letters or words. Visual perception, or information we gain through seeing is an important pre-reading skill. It is also something you can teach them about without using letters or words.

When you think about trying to teach your child ten different skills before you can even begin teaching them about words and letters, it can seem overwhelming. However, many of these skills are things your child is already exposed to in their everyday life. You are probably even teaching them some skills, without even realizing it. Take a look at the visual perception skills and see how many you are already helping your child to learn.

• Color perception: Help your child learn to recognize different colors, including light and dark shades. You can teach your child this skill by looking at dark and light red apples at the store. Remind them both kinds of apples are still red.
  
• Shape perception:This includes recognizing shapes, even when those shapes are different sizes, such as large and small circles.
  
• Spatial Relations: Talk to your child about how objects are placed. The red ball might be next to the blue ball. And also where objects are placed, such as the blue slide is closer to the swings than the yellow slide.
  
• Visual analysis: How information is seen and understood is important to reading success. Wordless picture books are a good way to help your child learn to take in more information by observing details when they read.
  
• Part vs. Whole: Help your child learn that a whole object can be composed of many parts, which will help them learn that letters are put together to make words. One way you can teach this to your child is with a recipe. Eggs, flour, oil and sugar become a cake when mixed together the right way and baked in the oven.

• Visual Conceptualizing: This involves how our mind makes a picture from what we see and what we have known. We can call something a tree because we know trees have a trunk, branches and usually have green leaves, even when those things look a little bit different from each other.
  
• Visual Discrimination: Your child can learn to see the differences between objects, such as how one apple might be bigger than another. When they begin to read, this skill will help them see how the letters "b" and "d" are different.
• Visual Memory (Sequential): This involves seeing and remembering information we see in a certain order. This is important for reading because words are spelled in a certain order and sentences have to be read in a certain order to make sense.
  
• Visual Memory (Spatial): Remembering things in this way involves where objects are placed. Concentration games are great for developing this type of memory it involves remembering where objects are located to help find them.
  
• Visual Patterns: Help your child learn to make and recognize patterns using shapes, objects or even letters. You can let them make their own patterns or match the patterns you make.
  
• Visual Sequencing: Your child needs to remember things in a specific order to help build this skill. What happened next activities are a good way to build this skill, where pictures of a story are cut out and need to be placed in the order they happened.

Many children's shows such as Sesame Street also help teach and reinforce these important skills. Children will love doing activities they saw Elmo doing on TV, or remembering that Big Bird had a hard time remembering what happened next too. Everyone wants their child to become a great reader. By helping your child learn pre-reading skills first, you will help them learn important ideas they will use to read. Check out my other hubs for more ideas you can use to teach your child to read.