A child must first learn how to understand before it can learn how to speak.
If a child cannot learn to speak, learning the alphabet might be impossible.
Without knowing all the letters of the alphabet, a child will be unable to form words and sentences.
What this simply means is that a child’s journey learning how to read starts from an early age.
The basis on which their literacy skills are built upon start with speech and cognitive development.
Every other aspect comes after.
Generally, children are different from one another and they develop at their own pace.
Parents and caregivers play a vital role in the development of a child.
They are the first point of call when it comes giving the child the necessary support when they are ready to advance.
There isn’t much that parents and caregivers can if a child is not willing to learn the alphabet.
If a child is showing signs and a readiness to learn the alphabet, but there isn’t any support or opportunity made available by the parent, the child will still not learn it.
The roles of the parents are vital in the early stages of a child’s development.
They are to provide the opportunities so that the child can advance in learning when they want to.
In many countries, primary education behind at age six.
Usually, the school dedicated the next three years to teaching children to read so that their reading foundation will be solid by the age of nine.
However, there are many cases where children learn to read much earlier than nine.
We will break the skills need to learn to read into three timelines in order to illustrate the development of a child’s literacy skills.
This may vary from child to child and you will sometimes notice that these three timelines sometimes overlap.
Speech
Children begin to understand and mimic sounds from the earliest age.
You may find them sounding their first words even as early as 6 months or in some cases as late as a year and some months.
At two years old, a child may already have a vocabulary rich with up to 100 words.
This may grow to about 500 words by the age of three.
That number may go up to as high as 5000 words or more by the age of five.
Speech forms the base on which reading and writing skills are developed.
Alphabet
Generally, children do not develop the refined cognitive ability to identify words and the complex shape of letters not until after the age of two.
They may actually be able to identify the shapes of simple letters such as “x” and “O” before the age of two.
Letters that have complicated shapes such as “Q” will be harder for them to identify. Children will at some point between the age of two and four be able to learn the alphabet.
Reading
By the age of six, most children have already learnt to read and their reading skills develop to a competent level by the age of eight. However, many children are capable of reading at an earlier age.
Some children are capable of combining letters to form words and identifying words as early as three years old. But it is more usual for them to develop this skill from the age of four to six years old.