Joe Pagano

Teaching Your First or Second Grader to Read



Posted: Thursday, April 28, 2011

by Joe Pagano
Math by Joe

What could be more fundamental than reading? What greater gift can you as a parent give to your youngster than that of the ability to be a great reader? How do you accomplish such a great legacy? Let's find out.

Reading is truly a gift. If your child can learn to become a great reader, there is literally nothing from which such a child will be excluded. As someone who was not always a great reader, I can certainly vouch for the import of the previous statement. I had only started to become a great reader when I started reading the works of Isaac Asimov at age fifteen. These works opened up a world of fascination to me and from that day forward I relished reading whatever I could get my hands on. The results of this endeavor encompass my ability to read anything and everything, to be able to teach myself many new skills from reading, and to read in at least five different languages.

Although my experience teaching had encompassed reading education to first and second graders, it was not until I started working with underprivileged Hispanic kindergartners through third graders that I realized the way to successful reader education. One of my second graders could not read at all at the beginning of the thirty-hour after school program that I was administering to her. Toward the middle of the program, she was beginning to read whole paragraphs---a major improvement!

What I had done with this second grader was to read with her select passages, appropriate to her level, word by word, helping her to pronounce those words which were unfamiliar. I would underline the words that presented difficulty. After the passage was completed, I would have her write each unfamiliar word three times on lined paper. I would then have her read and repeat each word. This activity not only helped sear each word into her memory but also helped her with her writing skills. Such a simple one-two combination activity as this put her on the road to literacy.

In addition to the above combination, it also behooves you to make a concerted effort to put reading on a platform where this activity takes precedence in your children's lives. You need to set aside a specific regular time interval to read with your child and to do this activity. Once this routine is established, both you and your child will settle into it quite nicely; moreover, the benefits will be extraordinary.

Try this out for a few weeks and watch the results. You will be amazed at how your children progress and how their vocabularies increase. You will also see a marked improvement in their penmanship. Just remember to smile when they bring home those good grades from school and when the teacher tells you that they are at the head of the class.
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