It has been shown repeatedly that children who start school with good phonological awareness have better literacy outcomes.

Here are some easy and fun ways to help develop phonological awareness for your child:

Listen to music, nursery rhymes, and songs for children (Yolanda recommends Tessarose and Love to Sing).

When reading, talk about the stories, point to the pictures, make the noises of the animal characters (Yolanda recommends Eardrops).

Use sound lotto games such as Listening Lotto and Sound Tracks to develop a wide repertoire of known sounds.

Top tip: Yolanda’s book Developing Phonological Awareness is packed with quick practical activities you can do with your child from birth. Parents are also welcome to take part in a Developing Phonological Awareness training webinars with Yolanda to learn how to effectively develop phonological awareness with their child.

The skills required to be able to visually discriminate between words are laid down well before children read their first book. Games and activities where children must use visual information to match or separate one item from another visually will hone this skill.

Teach your child the principle of ‘same same’:

Smart Tray with the Early Accelerator card system.

Did you know that children can learn to read their name from the age of two years, if not earlier?

Talking to and with your child from birth is vitally important. Many studies have shown that the quantity of language spoken to the child predicts their later vocabulary and progress in literacy.

Have conversations. Talk about stories, people, places. Talk talk talk and read, read, read.

Start at birth and continue until they leave home. There is no reason to stop reading to your child. Did you know that children’s picture books have three times more interesting words in them than the conversation of university graduates? Building vocabulary early has long-term positive benefits for young readers.

Reading to children extends vocabulary, oral language, phonological awareness and opens the world for children. Read at least five stories over the day with your child. Also include rhymes and poems.

THE CHECKLIST:

Yolanda’s favourite books for babies and toddlers

Hairy Maclary, Lynley Dodd

We’re going on a bear hunt, Michael Rosen & Helen Oxenbury

My cat likes to hide in boxes, Eve Sutton

Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?, Bill Martin Jnr

Each peach, pear, plum, Janet & Allan Ahlberg

An anthology of nursery rhymes such as This Little Puffin

Yolanda’s favourite books for pre-schoolers

Farmer Duck, Martin Waddell

The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson

Animalia, Graeme Base

The Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf

Dr. Seuss books

plus classic traditional tale books

Being school-ready for literacy means starting school with the skills in place to optimise your child’s first formal literacy learning experiences.

THE CHECKLIST:

Phonics is not just knowing how to hear, read and write sounds/letters. It is also knowing how to use these sounds (phonemes) for blending and segmenting for use in reading and writing.

The starting place, once phonological awareness is developed, is the alphabet. Children need to know all the letter sounds, names, and word associations. As the brain is wired for story, it is helpful to tell children little stories (mnemonics) about each letter to teach the sound, word association, and letter name.

Yolanda has written a free alphabet mnemonic scheme with short letter stories and word associations that you can download for use with your child.

You can also buy the stories in a handy pocket-sized card pack.

Also available are letter/mnemonic flashcards, and an alphabet wall frieze that could be used in their bedroom for a fun and colourful wall decoration. Reinforce the letters whilst developing motor skills and muscles in hand necessary for writing with Yolanda’s alphabet playdough mats.

A smart tray with the Phonemic Awareness card set offers a hands on way for children to practise their phonic skills.

Yolanda’s Alphabet Sounds (NZ) App allows children to hear, read and write the letters for the alphabet sounds. it is available in both the Google Play and Apple stores for a $3.49 annual subscription.

High-frequency words are the words that appear most frequently in text. E.g., the, is, my, go, come. Did you know that only 100 words make up half of all reading? When children learn these common words (also called sight words), it frees their brain to attend to and work on the other words in text they don’t yet know. Over time, children develop an ever-increasing bank of these words until eventually almost every word is known and they have an extensive graphic knowledge. Reading is much easier when you recognise all the words and don’t have to work them out.

It takes time to develop good graphic knowledge. This is why we teach phonics. It gives children a way to get a word that they don’t yet know. But some words (e.g., was, come, saw, my, I) are not easily decodable. And for many such early words, it is more efficient to teach the child to recognise them by sight.

Yolanda has developed a programme called Early Words for teachers and parents to do with their children to help them learn these basic sight words. Yolanda used this programme to teach her own four children before they started school and has also taught it to many students and teachers. It has been taught in the U.K as well as many schools in New Zealand.

The Early Words book has all the instructions for how to teach the programme but parents are also welcome to attend Yolanda’s online Early Words courses for teachers.

Here are useful suggestions of what you can do if your child is having problems and feeling stuck when learning to read.

Tip
Encourage your child at this early level to read with their finger (drop it later once they have the idea of the one-to-one matching). Encourage them to re-read the books again and again to develop fluency and expression.

Watch Yolanda teach her nephew to read a simple guided reading book.

Yolanda has written 50 little guided reading books, the Early Words Readers, for children’s first reading experiences. These books are used in schools, but you also can start teaching your child to read with the first book in Set One (Mum). The next day, teach the second book in the set (Mum is Exercising). Then work your way up the reading levels, book by book. Children love the Early Words Readers stories. And they feel confident and successful being able to read their own little book.

Listen to Yolanda talk with Jesse on RNZ about writing the Early Words Readers.

Here are useful suggestions of what you can do if your child is having problems spelling a word when writing.

Specific Learning Difficulties affecting literacy learning can include dyslexia, dysgraphia, difficulties with memory, organisation, auditory and visual processing, time management skills, and more.

Yolanda is a mother of children with severe Specific Learning Difficulties. Knowing that the education system is not resourced to properly help children with these difficulties, she taught her own children plus used a wide variety of learning and support programmes throughout their education.

Read How My Brain Learns to Read by Duncan Milne to your child.

In this Ted talk, educator Anita Collins makes a passionate case for music education as an indispensable part of school curricula, describing how learning to play music is the neurological equivalent of a full-body workout.