Kids will start showing an interest in independently reading at varying stages of their development and for some kids they start as early as age 3 while others may not show an interest until later on in their development (8 or 9).
There's nothing wrong with this despite what we may see in mainstream common core standards and social media.
Some kids are simply more interested in gross motor activities, creating art, music, whatever it may be, but eventually they will start peaking an interest and when they are ready you will already have some simple strategies to be able to use with them.
Also the very best thing that you can do if your child isn't showing interest, is keep introducing it with no strings attached, the more you try and push a kiddo who isn't interested, the more they are just going to hate reading in general.
Whenever we are learning anything new, this can be for us as adults, kids, any human what we are actually doing is strengthening the neurons in our brain to create pathways that will reinforce what we know and what we are learning.
Which is why if you can ever tie a new skill into something that your kiddo already knows, this can be a great way to not only reinforce previous knowledge but also make it faster to incorporate new knowledge.
When kiddos are starting to read, I always break this down into 2 sets of categories.
One category being words that can be sounded out phonetically like cat /c/ /a/ /t/ cat.
The other category are words that don't generally follow a phonemic pattern and words that we simply have to memorize or memorize its pattern. For example- the word you, phonetically it is not prononuced by seperating each letter so these are words that we need to keep practicing aka memorizing until that neural pathway is strong enough that we can instantly recognize it.
These are most commonly known as sight words, and there are so many sight word lists out there that you can find online. There isn't one that's better than another in my opinion, my advice here would be to pick one list and stick with it.
Sight Word lists:
Fry Sight Words
Dolch Sight Words
Multiple ways to incorporate this into your everyday:
Do a word search around the house, in the books you have in the house
Use flashcards and place them around the house and have them go on a word hunt
Write a sentence they can read on a piece of paper and have them draw a picture of the sentence.
Make it fun! Reading doesn't have to be done in a vacuum. Incorporate it into as many different activities as you can so that you can building the connection in their brain and strengthening their confidence along with it.
I hope this helps give you a starting point to introduce reading. It doesn't have to be scary or overwhelming I promise!
Let me know what you thought of this week's episode @intentionaleducationpodcast.
