In recent decades, the percentage of literate people in the state is one of the objective criteria for assessing the development of society, but in our country now there is hardly at least one adult who could not read in any language.
Learning to read is considered one of the main milestones in the learning process of a baby, and if a child has already mastered this wisdom, this fact always becomes a matter of pride for his parents and a topic of conversation for everyone around. It is not surprising that so many parents strive to teach their child to read as early as possible, so it is worth taking a closer look at how this is done.
Why is this necessary?
In general terms, a person needs reading at least in order to discover amazing opportunities for self-education. As practice shows, those who read a lot and correctly, often have a significantly higher level of erudition than graduates of the best educational institutions, and the latter also pay money for the knowledge they acquire, while there are many ways of free access to books.
Without the ability to read, even with amazing teachers, a person is unlikely to learn everything that is necessary for success in the modern world, because then he would have to memorize 100% of the information without the possibility of subsequent repetition from his own notes.
Moreover, a huge amount of text, including numerous statistics and information supplied through social networks, can only be obtained today if you can read.
In addition, under the onslaught of modern technology, people have gradually begun to forget that reading is not only a way of self-education, but also a good hobby, that is, killing time for the benefit of yourself. Even if literature does not carry any special moral and aesthetic content, it can still help pass the time, and if, in fact, books are not interesting to you, comics can replace them.
After all, even if reading as an occupation is clearly not yours, it will still be useful in life. At least in order to read signs, signs on houses or even maps on the phone, to navigate in an unfamiliar place. In order to keep in touch on social networks and by e-mail, or to read instructions or a legend for a computer game, after all!
In a word, it is so impossible to live without reading in the modern world that a person literally falls out of it, not being able to read.
However, reading as an occupation not only allows you to extract information from what you read, but also significantly develops many other useful skills that will definitely come in handy in life.
Child development experts say the benefits of this activity are as follows:
Develops attention and memory
A very important point in any training is the ability to concentrate attention and selectively memorize information. It may seem strange to an adult, but for a child such a task is not at all easy, because he is constantly distracted by any noise, dreams and so on. While reading, he has to concentrate on the text in order to grasp some meaning and memorize at least one sentence in its entirety, or better - the entire paragraph at once.
Increasing the volume of the operative field of view
Even the visual field on which the child focuses is much smaller than that of an adult. Of course, the child will see any sharp movement in front of him, even if at that moment he was not looking directly at this point.
In general, child psychologists argue that “capturing” a whole word it is difficult for a beginner reader, in fact, he sees only 3-4 letters. At the initial stage of training, this phenomenon is considered to be quite normal., however, in the future, the baby will learn to quickly process the information received from a larger surface in his head.
Expanding vocabulary
Proficiency in any language is always relative, because even you, while reading this article in Russian, definitely do not know all the words from this language - at least highly specialized terms that are not related to your occupation and some dialectal words are unknown to you.
The child, on the other hand, starts learning a language from scratch - as if you were studying a foreign language, so even to some intermediate level he comes gradually. Some words in every language are everyday, and children learn them literally right away, for example, "mom", "eat", "sleep", "warm", "toys" and so on
However, most words have nothing to do with the life of a child, are not used by the overwhelming majority of people every day, and the baby absolutely cannot see them with his own eyes.
For example, everyone knows the word "eternity", but it is not used very often. Such a concept is not easy to explain even to an adult, if suddenly by some miracle he does not know him, but how to explain it to a child? What should a conversation with a baby be in general so that he gets an idea of eternity? But from books he sooner or later learns this concept, and the situation described there will probably allow him to also learn the meaning of the word.
Articulation development
Without knowing the language, newborns, naturally, do not know pronunciation either. Everyone who has dealt with young children must have noticed that they speak very indistinctly, and it is not easy to understand them the first time. At the same time, the development of the vocal apparatus is somewhat hampered by the fact that for himself the baby speaks only about basic needs such as food and sleep, and parents who are accustomed to slurred babbling and the general simplicity of the child's phrases learn to distinguish the slightest sound, which does not stimulate the little one to speak more clearly.
Speaking would, of course, improve pronunciation, and reading can help profoundly. in that. The fact is that small children first learn to read aloud, and only then master reading in silence. As they say what they read, they gradually approach the purity of oral speech.
Fluent reading program
Theoretically, it is possible to force a child to learn letters at a fairly early age, but the meaning of learning lies not only in knowing the alphabet corny, but also in the ability to turn individual letters into words, but the main thing is not to voice the text mechanically, but to understand what it is about.
Naturally, it is expected that the child will spend relatively little time on this, and although he is still very far from the best examples of adult speed reading, it is important to train him precisely the speed of information perception.
For this purpose, child development specialists develop their own fluent reading programs - a set of exercises that purposefully stimulate the development of the child's skills that will help speed up the process.
Many such techniques have been invented, and each of them has the right to exist, but if parents want to teach a child to read not just somehow, but quickly, coherently and meaningfully, then he must have a certain level of readiness for this.
To determine the moment when you can already learn to read quickly, you should pay attention to the child's presence of the following skills:
- Difficult speech skills... Unless the baby is dumb, he must first learn to speak, and only then quickly read.
This does not imply the ability to pronounce individual words and build extremely simple sentences from them, but proficiency in speech at that level to be able to make complex sentences, and even short stories. Roughly speaking, if a child in a few phrases is able to tell how his day went or how they played in kindergarten, then this is already that level.
- Phonemic hearing... In order for the letters to logically fold into words, and not be read as a set of separate sounds, the child must be able to break words into separate phonemes in his head. Of course, no one forces a child who cannot read at all to write full-fledged transcriptions of the spoken words - usually a simple ability to name the sound that appears at the beginning or end of a word is tested.
- No serious speech therapy problems... In fact, poor or incorrect pronunciation is not an obstacle to learning to read, however, child development experts believe that a child who cannot speak correctly will take a very long time to retrain if he is taught to read without first correcting speech defects. At the same time, parents often believe that speech therapy problems are something like the inability to pronounce the sound "r", however rhythm and melodic disturbances are also considered a problem, because then it will be difficult to explain to the child what punctuation marks are for.
- Spatial orientation... It would seem, how does this factor relate to reading? Even as it relates, the baby does not need to read at random, but to have a clear idea of the direction of reading.
At a minimum, you need to remember the rule: first - from left to right, and if the line ends - then from top to bottom look for the next line. In order for this rule to have any meaning for a child, he must at least understand where is "right" and where is "left."
Of course, on signs and in some other cases, the order of writing may be different. However, the child will master such wisdom on his own when he will be able to read well in the usual order for the Russian language.
Usually, experts recommend teaching children to read no earlier than they reach the age of 5 years. However, if the parents do not force the child, and he himself shows clear success in this matter, then, of course, you should not restrain the baby.
What is speed reading: the benefits and harms of technology
Some techniques not only offer to teach a child to read, but promise impressive results that allow the child to master huge chunks of text in an extremely short time.
For example, a fairly well-known trick is reading obliquely, when the reader literally looks through the page from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, in fact, snatching from there not integral sentences, but individual words that are already formed in his head into certain connected thoughts. However, the opinions of scientists regarding the benefits of such "life hacks" for children are divided.
The main advantage of such techniques is obvious - a modern person literally has to pass a sea of information through himself, so the higher the reading speed, the better.
The ability to quickly find the main thing in the text and draw conclusions allows you to leave more time for other activities, among which, in particular, there may be additional self-development. Among other things, also increases perseverance, as well as attentiveness - the qualities required to perform most complex tasks.
Usually, erudition also increases - it is much more interesting to have a conversation with such a person, he understands most of the phenomena of modern life.
There is also a purely psychological point: if a child has a habit of mentally communicating with himself (and there are up to 15% of such children), then he is less open for communication with other people.
Speed reading, due to the high speed of information processing, completely closes the possibilities for mental articulation of the read and promotes its discussion with others.
Nevertheless, not everything is so rosy. In particular, speed reading is considered normal practice exclusively for high school students and adults, and it does more harm than good to children... A child is simply not ready for such a test - he is not able to quickly absorb information in such volumes, and he also cannot highlight the main thing, immediately discarding the unnecessary.
Trying to get him to achieve the expected result leads to the fact that he becomes nervous and stressed, which does not contribute to his health in any way.
This implies the wrong motivation for speed reading - the child seeks to read faster, but it is not at all a fact that he properly analyzes the information and assimilates the necessary knowledge. In addition, in an effort to read faster, the child will begin to "swallow" the endings of words, which over time will be reflected in oral speech.
Experts advise not to start training reading speed earlier than 7 years old, however, this age is not an axiom either, because one should start from the level of individual development of the baby.
Evaluate at least his conversational ability - if the little one does not have time to pronounce 60-70 words per minute or does it with great difficulty, then the time has definitely not come yet for such exercises. At the same time, one should not think that reading speed at an early age does not need to be developed at all - such exercises will still bring some benefit, just no need to immediately demand from the child an immediate and obvious result.
Methods and exercises
Classes on teaching reading and increasing its speed can be conducted for children aged 5-6 years. Ideally, this should be daily training, but in order to to achieve maximum efficiency, you need to organize them in the form of a game - this is the only way to interest the baby and push him to voluntarily improve his own skills.
Techniques for quickly reading and memorizing information are often collected by teachers in special books, the complete study of which with a child, according to the author, should give a noticeable result.
For example, Shamil Akhmadullin offers a textbook called “Speed reading for children. How to teach a child to read and understand correctly ", training in which requires only one hour of lessons per day, however allows you to reach your goal in just ten days... A very similar manual is also offered by Guzel Abdulova, whose creation "Speed reading for children" does not set such global tasks in the short term, but contains materials that are very similar to those of her colleague.
Very popular for speeding up the reading process is also Fedorenko system, which looks like a very wide table with relatively few random letters scattered across it at large white gaps. There is no sense in what was written, but the author of the methodology invites the trainee to simply relax, sit down as comfortably as possible and try to grasp more of the text at a glance.
Since the text in the table is not at all thick, the task does not seem difficult, because there is no need to concentrate on one point in order to read as much as one letter, however, over time, a person a reflex is developed that makes him perceive in this way even large textswritten in small print.
However, this technique is not at all like a game, so it is only suitable for teenagers, and even then, only for those who themselves understand the importance of fast reading and are ready to devote their time to it.
Since this process does not contain any signs of fun, the exercise is designed for about ten minutes a day, but the time and environment should be chosen as calm as possible so that nothing distracts.
Sometimes children are also taught to read not by individual letters, but immediately by syllables or even whole words, which simplifies the reading of a child who does not think about how to pronounce the combination of letters correctly.Nevertheless, this method has been criticized for the fact that unfamiliar words, for example, of foreign origin, can confuse such a kid who is not trained in the continuous reproduction of unfamiliar letter combinations.
Many other targeted approaches can be found, but most non-teaching parents are not prepared for a systematic approach.
In this situation, it would be much wiser to use separate play exercises, which can produce results even with occasional use:
- Reading together... Children still love to be read aloud to them, but if the child already knows a little about reading, you can sometimes, referring to fatigue, ask him to read a little himself - for the parents.
The main thing here is not to accelerate the speed, but to ensure reading aloud without errors, because over time, having honed this skill at a slow pace, the child will suddenly notice that he could do it much faster.
You can interest a child either by playing on his desire to please his beloved parents, or by clearly demonstrating genuine admiration for his success.
- Useful reading... The kid, perhaps, will not be interested in the book - it can lose in color to cartoons and frighten in large volumes. Whether it's a note! Create written messages for the child that he cannot receive in any other way. This includes to-do lists, postcards, and everything else that mom and dad's fantasy is capable of.
- Presentations... Children are very fond of any bright images, but at the same time they are curious enough to want to learn more about what they have drawn. In this regard, for the development of reading skills, presentations are very useful that do not accompany the pictures with a voice commentary, but contain concise captions. Other things that are popular among children are somewhat similar in effect - children's illustrated fairy tales, encyclopedias and even comics.
- Reading at speed... Children generally love any speed games, because this is a challenge: will you have time or not? It is quite possible to adapt reading to this scheme, but it is important to remember two points: you cannot get carried away and make the game a routine, but the established time frame should be adequate and not seem unreal to the child.
- Reading whirring... A great way to stop your child from reading only aloud is to ask them to read the text while making a buzzing sound. Such a simple sound does not put too much stress on the brain, at least the activity of immediately vocalizing what was read would take much more effort from the child, which can instead be directed to increasing the reading speed.
For how to teach a child to read, see the next video.
