Tips to Rock Your Child's Reading Development - Three to Five Years

The Osceola Reads Team understands the many milestones that come with parenting. That’s why we have researched a few tips to incorporate with your child during different developmental stages to ensure they are prepared for the reading road ahead! Hello, preschooler! During the fourth and fifth years of your child’s life, they will begin to become interested in adults and children outside of your family, developing relationships with others, and thus shaping their own personality. You can also develop a healthy relationship with reading by:

• Having conversations
• Asking questions during read-alouds
• Singing songs and rhymes

Having Conversations

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, your child’s language skills are continuing to develop. They need to hear other children and adults speaking to help build their speaking skills. Be sure to speak to and around them in complete sentences. Help improve their vocabulary by using “grown up” words, or the correct form of words as opposed to “baby talk.”

Asking Questions During Read-Alouds

Continue to read daily with your child and get the most out of this time by engaging them in the pictures and characters in the story. Once you finish reading a page, ask them, “What happened on this page?” Take this time to help them understand the plot of the story. When finished with the book, ask them to retell the story. Use prompts like:

• What happened in the beginning?
• What was the problem in the story?
• What happened in the middle?
• How did they solve the problem?
• What happened in the end?

These are effective ways to keep them thinking about the story and will help them apply similar thinking to other stories they read. When reading a story together on Footsteps2Brilliance, use the Book Buddies feature for questions specific to that particular story.If your child is showing an interest in electronics or you do not have time to visit your local Osceola Library System branch, another great reading tool is cloudLibrary provided by the library system. This resource allows you to check out eBooks and Audiobooks from home and on the go.

Visit our read-aloud library!

Singing Song and Rhymes

Another way to help with reading readiness is to sing songs and nursery rhymes together, working on building memory and anticipating words with rhyming ending sounds. Choose a word with a vowel consonant ending, like bat, and work with your child on naming words with the same -at ending sound. Build up to words with a vowel consonant consonant ending, like swing, and then continue the game finding words with the -ing ending. This may take time at first, but soon you will notice your child finding rhymes on her own with commonly heard words.

Find nursery rhymes and rhyming games on Footsteps2Brilliance!

This is the final time for learning before your child starts on a new path in kindergarten, and like they say, practice makes perfect. Don’t be afraid to review the “basics” like singing the ABC’s before bedtime or spelling your child’s name out loud. Doing these things will help ensure your child has a great start to their education and is not caught off guard the first day of school.Your child will learn more during the first three to five years than during any other time of her life. You are your child’s first and most important teacher. Take the time from birth to help her have a head start in her future development and learning.