As parents, you want to provide all your children with the best foundation for educational success. Learning to read is an integral part of your child’s academic process. Children learn vital language skills from their everyday environment.

Encouraging Reading at Home

Providing a learning environment at home to encourage language skills will aid in your child’s future reading ability. Enhancing your home environment for reading potential does not require large changes.

• Be an Example: a child who sees parents reading will want to mimic the task. Reading books, magazines, or newspapers show your child you value the practice. While you are engaged in reading, let your child read. He or she may not understand the word. The natural curiosity through mimicking you will help down the road.
• Read to Your Child: Even a short book with pictures will aid in the learning process for language skills. As you and your child look at the pages, sounding out the words is a vital learning experience.
• Play Games: With the numerous games available, learning the correct phonetics of words helps a child’s natural progression toward reading. Tracing letters in sand or using picture cards may be a simple project with a beneficial outcome. Building blocks with letters help children identify the basics of the language through play.
• Get Moving: Numerous age appropriate songs encourage both movement and language skills. Duplicating the songs instructions provides a fun home activity.
• Use Art: Children love to get messy. Use art as a way to inspire creativity and build language skills. Painting traced letters will provide both a learning and fun experience. Or, use glue to trace a letter. As you child glues pasta noodles to the letter, discuss the sound of the letter. Provide examples of the words that begin with the same letter.
• Use Conversation: In the Montessori school setting, the multi-age group learning environment allows younger children to converse with older peers. Resulting in the fine-tuning of language skills. Use the same process at home by encouraging conversation.

Duplicating Montessori language projects at home will provide numerous activities to gain your child’s interest in reading.

Your Montessori school teacher will prepare a language enriched environment to help nurture your child’s natural curiosity for learning. The primary focus of both classroom and home environment for Montessori language is your child’s personal interests.

To see how a child-centered learning environment would be beneficial for your child’s natural learning process, please contact us at Day Star Montessori for more information and to schedule a tour.