Ready to Read

Here are the six skills every child needs in order to learn to read.  Every time you read your child a book, or talk about a book, or have fun with a book, you are developing these skills!  There's no single right way to teach these skills.

• Print Motivation - being interested in books and enjoying them.  My hope is that this blog has given you some ideas for encouraging your child to love reading and associate books with fun activities like movement and crafts.

• Phonological Awareness - understanding the sound structures in a language.  Sing songs, come up with rhymes, read books that follow a repetitive sentence structure and ask your child to fill in part of the sentence. 

• Vocabulary - knowing the names of things and learning new words.  According to Jim Trelease, the average picture book has about 9 times the number of rare words per thousand than the average conversation with a three year old.

• Narrative skills - being able to tell a story and describe events.  This doesn't only have to be the retelling of a book.  Every night at dinner, I ask my three year old to tell my husband what we did that day.

• Print Awareness - knowing how to handle a book and knowing that the letters on the page are symbols linked to language.  (They understand that when a parent is reading to them, they are reading words and not pictures.)  The most effective way to teach this is through read alouds and modeling. 
• Letter Knowledge - knowing letters are different from each other and knowing letters are everywhere.  Draw attention to words and letters and let kids play with print.

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. - Emilie Buchwald