How can I help my child have good literacy skills?

Eastside SpeechFAQs

Speech pathologist helping child having good literacy skills

Here are a few ideas / tips to help your child with their literacy skills:

  • Read to your child early and often! Parents who start to read to their children from early in life (even as infants) are more likely to continue- it becomes a great habit ?. Start with with simple colourful books. Continuing to read to children helps them to build vocabulary, language skills & early literacy skills.
  • Have letters part of fun activities at home in the preschool years- make letter shapes out of dough, paint them, write them and cut them out.
  • Have lots of great, fun, interesting children’s books in your home.
  • If your child is struggling with reading at school, seek good, evidenced based help early.  The first three years of school are critical in learning to read, so don’t wait. The evidence is that the best way to teach children to read and help children with reading challenges is with a phonics-based approach.

Best way to help children improve their literacy when they are struggling

It’s important to get help early.

Don’t wait, and hope their skills will improve, as the rest of the class will leave them behind.

The evidence says that a direct, phonics based approach has been proven to be the most effective way to improve children’s literacy skills. A phonics based approach helps children blend sounds together to make words, and “pull sounds apart” to read words. These things are fundamental to literacy success- that’s why we use this approach in our clinic.

At Eastside Speech we provide individualised programs to help children with literacy problems. For more information about our Literacy, Reading & Spelling Specialised Programs for Children get in touch with one of our Speech Pathologists today on 02 9313 8980.