Use all the senses

If you want to teach your preschooler to read, get them interested in the finer points of reading using the five senses.

Sight. Readers of English are so used to looking from left to right and from top to bottom that you forget that babies don't automatically know that that's the way it goes. Run your finger underneath the words when you read to show them the direction of thoughts on the page.

Touch. Make or buy letters that babies can hold or trace with their fingers.

Sound. Sing about letters and make up silly songs about words that sound alike (I recently made up a song about how ducks have flippers, but dogs have paws). For ideas about what to sing about, "They Might be Giants" has two great DVDs, one about http://store.theymightbemerch.com/herecomeabcscd.html and another about numbers. I especially like their song about vowels.

Taste. Make pancakes out of letters, spell "hot dog" with ketchup and mustard and carry on conversations about the foods that you and your kids are eating.

Smell. Spend a day talking about the things that you smell; the citrus smell of an orange, peanut butter, trash, flowers, pepper. Make a big show out of pronouncing the letters.

For more ideas about how to teach kids to read before they reach kindergarten, check out Barbara Curtis's website, www.mommyteachme.net. I'm currently reading Mommy Teach Me To Read!

Read to him whether he likes it or not!

Some of my friends say that their kids won't sit and listen to an entire story, and so they spend their time working on a puzzle or talking about the pictures. You can learn a lot from puzzles and pictures, but when it comes to reading stories from beginning to end, I never wait until my baby looks like he' s paying attention, I just plow ahead.

I mean, Calvin is a baby not an Oxford graduate student. He's never going to sit there with his hands folded and a thoughtful look on his face. He spends his time trying to eat the pages and rip off the moving tabs and flaps, but still, I plow ahead.

Tonight I read him The Saggy Baggy Elephant. He grabbed it while he cruised past the couch, and so I started to read it to him under the kitchen table, but then he crawled into the hallway, and I followed him, still reading, and finished the book with him laying on the kitchen floor waving a wire whisk. I think he enjoyed the story more when I crawled around the floor reading it to him.