Let's Hit The Books

What’s the secret to teaching your child to read? Singapore parents and experts share their best strategies.

- Venessa Lee

Young children often like to listen to the same stories over and over again.

This could exasperate some parents, but not Shamsiah Samsudin (pictured right). The 37-year-old reads her children’s favourite books to them repeatedly as part of her strategy to teach them how to read.

For one year, she read Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale by author Mo Willems, about a toddler and her stuffed rabbit, to her elder son, Adyan Darius Juffrey, now six.

After that year, Adyan, at age three, could recognise and read some words that could be found in its sequel, Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case Of Mistaken Identity, whose plot involves jealousy over plush toys.

By age four, he was “quite proficient” at recognising words, says Shamsiah, a part-time instructor at an enrichment centre.

Accounts such as hers are not likely to reassure anxious parents whose children are about to enter primary school and are still unable to read.

Teaching a child to read can be such a mysterious, bafïing process that it can be easier for parents to send their kids to phonics classes instead.

Read it again, Mum

 For parents who wish to persist on their own, experts say that repetition and memorisation are key when it comes to young children learning to read.

“While it can be exasperating for most parents to read the same much-loved book over and over again, it is this repetitive quality that enables a child to recognise story patterns and predict outcomes with the comforting knowledge that the story will always begin and end in the same way,” says Assistant Professor Rhoda Myra Garces-Bacsal from the Early Childhood and Special Needs Education Academic Group at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

It is also important to read aloud to children even before teaching them to read.