How Learning to Read Works - Developing a solid literacy foundation before school
What many people don’t realize is that education starts at conception and only stops at death. Education is life and life is education. If you are alive you are learning. Learning about pain, joy, cause and effect, communication, Science, etc.
School is not the be all and end all of education, however success at school can dramatically influence a child’s self-worth and this in turn influences their ability and willingness to be open to learning while they are there. So setting children on a positive learning path from the beginning of learning (birth or before) is drastically underestimated.
When parents know that a precious
bundle is on its way they begin to prepare the home environment, making it safe and clean. Mum eats better and is more focused on health. Both Dad and Mum start to talk to the little belly bump and many read children’s stories and play music as well.
When the little one arrives they use their senses to make meaning of the world. They use sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and emotion to interpret their surroundings. They learn about cause and effect. ‘I cry and I get fed, changed or cuddled.’
As the baby grows they disco
ver holding, moving, joy and pain, loud and quiet... it’s an incredible learning journey. In terms of literacy they understand that making particular sounds with their mouth (speaking) has meaning. For e.g. Dad, Mum, drink. They practice mimicking until they have mastered the word. (When learning to speak it is easier if a baby can hear). They then begin making sounds. E.g. ba, ba, ba, da, da, da, mmmmm. After a lot of practice they attempt words such as mum and dad. This usually gets soooo much positive attention that they want to do it again and again.
Some more time passes and the toddler wants more control over their environment and themselves. When they are thirsty or hungry they want to communicate it, so they observe how words sound and how people’s mouths move when they say those words. It seems like in no time at all that understandable words can be heard. Next comes a sentence. E.g. ‘Drink please mummy?’ Once saying one sentence has been successfully achieved many sentences soon follow. Before long recounts, stories, reports, all sorts of genre begin to flood out of the little mouths.
Setting Up for Successful Reading and Writing
(getting speaking right)
Reading and writing follow the same pattern. (please click here for songs, games, hands on activities and device based learning - it will be linking as soon as it is created)
First establish a safe learning environment.
Check and maintain the health of the child. Have yearly hearing and sight tests until at least Year 3. If at any stage there are concerns get them checked again. Make sure your child is having enough fresh air and is eating a healthy diet (most of the time).
Begin by providing lots of opportunities to hear words spoken correctly. Even though baby talk is really cute it can be detrimental later on if not corrected. It also makes it more difficult to identify lisps and other speech issues. Have a special book reading time. Treat books with respect. Cuddle up with your child when you read to them. Your child should feel safe and loved. Reading time should be something precious and something children look forward to.
When learning to speak practice clear and well projected speech. Pronouncing words correctly will assist children in spelling words correctly later on.
Always use lots of adjectives. “Can you please pass mummy the big, red, bouncy ball?” “Would you like a ripe, yellow banana?” This assists in writing descriptively later on.
When your child is capable, begin to encourage the use of a whole sentence and sentences.
Without much encouragement at all children should begin to naturally verbalize recounts and reports (they will tell you what happened).
What is Involved in Becoming a Successful Reader?
There are 5 key bricks in the construction of the reading wall. They are:
Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words.
Phonics: The relationships between letters of written language and individual sounds of spoken language.
Fluency: The ability to read a text quickly and accurately.
Vocabulary: These are words students must know and understand/comprehend to communicate effectively.
Text Comprehension: Understanding what is being read.
To help understand how important each of these stages is it is helpful to think of reading as a brick wall and that each aspect of learning to read the bricks. Within each layer of bricks are individual bricks (components) that make up the layer.
With phonemic awareness at the base, each step builds towards comprehension. If your child has been trained to identify individual phonemes and has been given explicit phonics instruction, then -- with practice -- that will lead to word decoding. As a child’s decoding skills are refined, the child becomes a fluent reader. As the child reads and learns, they are exposed to new vocabulary, increasing their comprehension with each new word.
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness is when children come to an awareness that words are made up of letters and that different letters have different sounds and representations (the shape of the written letter). It begins to build the basis of the reading wall and needs to be cemented well. Phonemic Awareness is the knowledge of:
Initial or beginning sounds: A ‘c’ sound start cat and car, but a ‘d’ sound is at the beginning of dog and door.
Rhyme: words which end with the same sound.
Syllables: how words can be segmented, or broken into pieces. For instance beetle is bee/tle. Some people say 2 claps. Others ask children to put their hands under their chin and when their chin goes down that is a syllable. All the technical definitions I found were not particularly helpful. Syllables are the parts of words. It’s where you cut them into piece. E.g. caterpillar is cat/er/pil/lar. This strategy can even help children recognize when to double letters in spelling. E.g. shopping shop/ping
Phonics
Phonics is the second foundational layer of reading. Children must come to an understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds so that reading can occur. Phonics put simply is the connection between written letters and their sounds. To know phonics is to know the alphabet, its sounds (phonograms) and the combination of letters and the new sounds they make (married phonograms).
This can be tricky as vowels and some consonants have more than one sound. For instance a has 6 sounds. As you say these words listen for the different sounds that a makes.
hat April after want Autumn about
The letter i has 3 sounds: inside, ice-cream, police
The letter c has a hard sound and a soft sound: cat and cereal
A key use for phonics is to help readers quickly determine the sounds in unfamiliar written words. When readers encounter new words in texts they use the elements of phonics to decode and understand them. They can use their knowledge to sound words out. E.g. town t ow n
Some words are more difficult to sound out and don’t always follow the rules. These words are usually put into a ‘sight word’ category and children memorize these words. Thus they recognize them upon sight.
Sometimes struggling reader rely primarily on one ready strategy. To become a more fluent read they must incorporate a variety of strategies to achieve greater success. In addition, phonics instruction improves spelling ability because it emphasizes spelling patterns that become familiar from reading.
Fluency
Fluency is the flow/rhythm of the reading. It seeks to reduce constant stopping, disruptions and jerkiness from reading. To assist in improving reading:
Model fluent reading.
Read Aloud - An adult reads aloud a text to the whole class.
Books on CD - Children can listen to stories on CD as they follow along in a book.
Buddy Reading - An upper grade child reads aloud to a lower grade child.
Device Reading – An App or website reads to the child.
Use guided oral reading instruction.
Choral Reading - The students, lead by the teacher, read aloud together.
Peer/Paired Reading- Students work as pairs, reading their text silently. Then the students take turns reading the passage three times orally to the other student. The listening student acts as the teacher by giving suggestions and feedback.
Echo Reading - echo reading, the teacher reads a sentence, paragraph, or page aloud and then has the students chorally reread that segment.
CD Assisted Reading - Children listen and read along with a CD.
Buddy Reading - An older student listens to a younger student read, giving appropriate feedback.
Have the child re-read a paragraph to get a ‘sense’ of what fluent reading feels like.
Give students ways to practice and perform.
Repeated Reading - Students choose their own appropriate text or the teacher assigns a passage. Discuss or revise reading behaviors such as phrasing, rate, intonation, etc. The students practice their texts several times until fluency has developed. Poems and rhymes are great for repeated reading. There are three ways to provide repeated reading experiences: direct instruction (whole class), independent choice, or assisted method (books on CD).
Independent Reading - Children choose text on their independent level to read silently.
Reader's Theater - Reader’s Theater is an oral performance of a script usually based on authentic literature. Meaning is conveyed through expression and intonation—students need to interpret the script instead of memorizing it, thus helping with comprehension as well as fluency. Repeated readings, or rehearsals, helps students build fluency in a natural and authentic manner.
Implement word study activities to build sight word knowledge and therefore accuracy. Activities are based on:
Speed drills
Flashcard practice
Word Walls
Sight Word Bingo
Vocabulary Activities
Fluency links word recognition and comprehension. Comprehension is not guaranteed because of fluency, but it sure helps.
The elements of Fluency include:
Accuracy: How accurate is the reading. What is the percentage of words that are correctly read?
Rate: The speed a person reads.
Prosody: This refers to stress, intonation, and pauses.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary refers to the words children must know to communicate effectively.
Two types of vocabulary: oral vocabulary and reading vocabulary.
A broad vocabulary provides a deeper word well to draw on when speaking and/or writing.
A broad vocabulary usually improves comprehension.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read.
Comprehension involves reading, thinking and reasoning.
To be able to comprehend children need to be able to decode what they read; make connections between what they read and what they already know; and evaluate what they have read. Questions such as: what is a written, what caused the event, how do the characters fell about the event, etc.
A hindrance to comprehension is insufficient vocabulary.
To assist these skills at home ask questions to make a prediction about the story before reading, pause and ask questions about the characters and the plot during the reading and then get your child to retell the story in their own words after reading.
Reading in sections and checking for understanding after each section benefits some children.
For an extension activity as your child to find evidence to support their answers in the text.
Categorize texts by genre. What do we expect to find in each genre?
Look for keywords. Use them to summarize the text. Sometimes graphs, map and graphic organizers can be useful for older children.
Learning Resources: Promoting Literacy Development http://pld-literacy.org/product-category/skills/oral-language-skills/comprehension-skills/ There are activities for children as young as 3 Years old.
The learning of letters and sounds will be broken into 3 sections: songs, hands on activities and technology. I will keep it as simple as possible as I am not into trying to complicate things to sound smart. I would prefer to be useful, realistic and manageable.
Helping to Promote Reading
1) Keep reading fun – don’t make it work. If it is a chore or punishment you have made your
life and your child’s much more difficult.
2) Don’t forget the beginning. It may seem silly, but make sure your younger children know about the flow of a book. Explain to them that we start books at the beginning and read to the end, that we read text from left to right, and then from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. Explain the front and back cover and the spine. Explain who the author and illustrator are. If there is a contents page discover why it is there.
3) Change it up. Expose your child to different types of texts and subject matter. Some children find factual and informative books about animals, geography, or cooking really interesting. Learning to play an instrument may also assist reading skills and speech. It helps children distinguish between different sound and understand the patterns of language. Children may be able to distinguish a particular instrument within the context of a band. This will be of benefit in a classroom environment when a child needs to block out distractions. There are many other benefits which will be addressed in a later post.
4) Use screen time effectively.
Screen time should be:
In an open space – never a
bedroom or behind closed doors.
Anything with a screen is screen
time – be aware that TV is
counted as screen time.
5) Give up the guilt. No one can do everything. Do what you can with what you know and then let the rest go. Don’t feel guilty yourself and don’t impose that guilt onto your children. Feeling bad never made anyone do better. In fact it can be detrimental to learning and relationships.
6) Comprehension. This means understanding the words and the pictures.
7) Practice engaged reading. This tip is especially applicable to parents with children who have not yet learned to read or who are in the process of learning. When you read with your child, talk and point to the words as you read them. This draws your child’s attention to the word, helping to solidify their word recognition and spelling abilities. Your children will always get more out of reading if you successfully engage their mind. Another fun activity is to have kids pick out the letters on a page that are also in their name or sight words they are learning.
8) What if? Be sure to discuss the story as you read it.
What if you were in the story? What would you think, feel or say? What will happen next? Why do you think that? Also, a great way to help children understand the meaning of new words and ideas is by helping them connect the concept to an experience they have had. For example, you could explain the meaning of "sadness" by using the way your child felt when a pet died or when they weren’t able to go to a birthday party.
9) Be the character. What sort of voice do they have?
What would the expression on their face look like in different situations?
What not to do when your child is learning
Laugh – this impacts trust, self-worth, relationship – it is so damaging – DON’T DO IT!
Twitch or make odd sounds when your child gets something wrong. This is likely to make your child feel self-conscious about their reading abilities through negatively reinforcement and it stifles the flow of their reading.
Try not to say “You know that! You just read it” If the child knew it they would have read it. This type of response makes a child feel inadequate and like a failure.
Don’t always jump in and save them with difficult words. Allowing sounding time and the use of other decoding and comprehension skills. This helps with confidence and independence.
Don’t think that disabilities can be ‘cured’. If you think your child is struggling more than they should it is important to seek help as early as possible.