How To: Help Your Child Get Ready to Read Through Games (Part II)

How-To: Help Your Child Get Ready to Read- Games, is a four-part series of how-to videos for parents, and early child care providers and educators that shows you different games you can play with your children to help get them ready to read in kindergarten. Each of the videos models a different technique that will increase your children's early literacy skills through fun and games. For more information about helping your child prepare for reading or to find more videos, check out the Stern Center's Building Blocks for Literacy online program for parents and educators.

This week's How-To is a strategy to teach kids about syllable awareness and how words are made up of different parts and sounds. Children progress from simpler to more complex tasks when working with syllables:

Level 1: Blending and putting syllables together. For example, a parent says, "Guess my secret word." And the child responds,"Bum ble bee."

Level 2: Segmenting and taking syllables apart within words. For example, "My name is E liz a beth."

Level 3: Taking syllables away is an even more complex skill. The video below demonstrates a game you can play with your child.