This is the first article in my 3-part series about How to Teach Reading. In this article I am focusing on ways to teach the pre-reading skills that preschoolers (3-6 year olds) need to learn before they can sit down and learn how to sound out words or focus on dedicated reading.
I think it is important to point out that I focus on pre-reading skills with preschoolers. These are skills that are essential for reading and make learning to read easy. Once a child has mastered all of these skills, learning to actually read only takes a few weeks. But, learning these skills can take years.
Like any skill important for a preschooler's life, these should be taught through play. Play is a young child's work, and they take it very seriously when they are having fun! You can click HERE to learn more about how a young child's brain works and how they learn best--the take-home message for this topic is that children learn pre-reading skills while they are playing. If they are not enjoying themselves, you need to change your approach!
Most people group "pre-reading" skills into the following six categories: Vocabulary, print motivation, print awareness, letter knowledge, narrative skills, and phonological awareness.
These six categories are important, and they are covered in my approach, but I prefer to emphasize a few different other topics that I think are the most important for young children. **If you are curious about my reasoning, just keep reading--I explain all the reasoning behind the methodology at the end of this post. :)
Right now, I want to share my own 6 Pre-Reading Areas of Focus. These are based on my own experiences as a licensed teacher, research about how young children learn, research about how the brain behaves when you learn to read, and my experiences teaching my own children to read. Each of these six focuses is absolutely vital for a child learning to read. The beautiful thing is that many parents are already teaching their children in these areas, and thus, naturally preparing them to learn to read.
I will list the six Focus Areas first, then introduce each of them thoroughly, explaining what they are, why each is important, and some playful ways you can teach each focus area skill.
I also have this awesome summary that I am sharing for free with anyone who subscribes to my VIP email group:
The Six Pre-Reading Focus Areas for Preschoolers are:
1- Patterns, Predictability, and Rhyming
2- Cause & Effect
3- Phonological Awareness
4- Eye & Ear Balance
5- Communication
6- Reading for Fun
#1: Patterns, predictability, and rhyming. This skill requires children to observe, recognize patterns, and predict what will come next. It is important in reading because it helps children anticipate words, check their "sounding out" attempts, and learn to recognize word families more quickly. This helps them develop reading fluency faster. My favorite way to "teach" these skills deliberately is through playing with my preschoolers. For example, use blocks to build a road for your village. Comment to your kiddos, "My road is a rainbow pattern! Here is a red block, then a blue block, then a yellow block, and another red block, then blue, then yellow, and another red, then blue...what color should I use next to keep my pattern going?" Use simpler patterns for younger kids. Even toddlers can be exposed to patterns without the dialogue--when you create patterns with toddlers, they see the patterns and revisit them to process again later. The more often they see patterns, the more solid "pattern pathways" become in their brains, and the easier it will be for them to recognize and recreate them later.
You can also help children practice predicting by creating routines in their days. For example, I teach a preschool Music & Active Movement class once a week. My girls know that on Monday mornings we do music. They also expect Music Time to start with a "Hello Song," then a song with scales, and end with parachute activities and a "Goodbye Song." They recognize the repeating pattern every week and expect to see it. You can also create smaller routines that help them practice predicting their schedule. For example, we go shopping after we go to gymnastics, we eat pizza and watch a movie on Friday nights, and on days when we're home we give the baby a nap after lunch.
Rhyming is a microcosm version of pattern recognition and prediction. The two ways we consistently work on rhyming are 1- reading rhyming picture books. Just reading them will help your child learn to rhyme, but you can also occasionally pause (instead of saying the rhyming word) and let your child fill in the missing word. 2- During the day we randomly make rhyming lists. For example, if I'm putting ham on a sandwich, I might narrate it by saying, "And now I'm going to get some HAM. Ham, Jam, Sam!" Then I look at my kids with a bit of a challenge look, and they usually add a few more rhyming words. Rhyme or Slime is another rhyming game you can play with your kids and The Great Boat Float is a rhyming game combined with a STEM activity.
#2: Cause & Effect. This requires children to recognize that certain actions and events cause others. This is a HUGE skill that actually is extremely useful in many areas for your kids! (Not the least of which is following instructions!) In reading it is necessary to see that each letter "causes" a specific sound, and certain combinations of letters changes the way those sounds work. This is easier for children to understand if they are accustomed to seeing and affecting cause and effect events in their lives. My favorite way to teach this is to let children do age-appropriate science experiments. Preschoolers love mixing colors, textures, and safe kitchen chemicals. Squeezing lemons makes lemon juice come out. Adding baking soda makes it fizz. Adding food color changes the color. Each action produces a change. Let your children make the changes, touch the changes, and tell you about them! Ask them what they did and what effect or change that made. I have a huge list of things that pop, fizz, and explode here -- these are some of our kids favorite things to experiment with cause and effect! You can also give your child a chance to predict effects by asking them what they think will happen if they (fill in the blank) . For example, what do you think will happen if we add red paint to this blue paint? Or, what do you think will happen if we clean this room happily?
#3: Phonological Awareness. Phonological Awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate phonemes (or distinct units of sounds, like the /p/ in "pirate"). Children begin developing phonological awareness the day they are born, as their brains start processing and developing language every minute they hear it! (I have more information about how children learn here.) Here is a list of phonological skills I have made during the last few years that are important for learning to read. Like everything else on this list, these are SO important, that I would not even begin formal reading lessons until your child has mastered these skills:
==> Dissecting sounds and words: separating the sounds in a word. You can incorporate this into play too. When you pick up a train, for example, say, "I have a tr---," and let them fill in the rest by saying "train" or "ain." Or when you're reading a book, cut words in half and let your preschoolers fill in the second half.
==> Building sounds and words: This is obviously the opposite of dissecting, and you will work on it any time you work on dissecting, but since it is a separate skill I'm listing it out too. ;)
==> Combining sounds to create words: This is the obvious precursor to sounding out words. You can help prepare your child for this by dragging out sounds occasionally when you talk or read. For example, you can say, "Do you want to go to the sssssssssstooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrre?" Drag out all the sounds you can when you say "store," or any other word you're in the mood to experiment with. ;) "Do you want a baaaaaaaaaaaaaanaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?" Throw in extra pauses sometimes too: "B (pause) a (pause) n (pause) a (pause) n (pause) a (pause)" sounds different than banana, and it prepares preschoolers to sound words out when their brain is already comfortable assembling sounds into words.
Singing, dancing, and listening to music also particularly help this area because it extends sounds in ways we don't usually do while we talk.
==> Identifying syllables: words are chunked into syllables, so if your kids can recognize syllables reading is easier. My favorite way to work on this is to sing and dance. Many songs have lyrics that are separated by syllables, and clapping, dancing, or moving with the rhythm helps your child recognize them. You don't even have to talk about them! You can also work on this by occasionally breaking up the words you say or read into syllables. You also might want to try this Syllable Tic Tac Toe or this syllable counting activity!
Here are three more fun phonological awareness activities: this mom plays a Phonemic Awareness Game with her daughter at bedtime, this song is excellent for practicing phonological awareness, segmenting and syllabifying (even without the pocket chart)! And this is a fun collection of Segmenting and other Phonological Awareness Activities too.
#4: Ear & Eye Balance. This is a huge part of pre-reading that is often overlooked! Inside the retina is a small pit called the fovea, where layers of the retina literally move aside so that light lands directly on the cones in the eye. This gives you the clearest image, but you can only focus the fovea on a very small area at any one time. This means that in order to read a whole word in the clearest possible focus your eyes have to focus, readjust, and focus again several times! Each time your eyes focus on a new letter, they have to send that image to the brain, process it, analyze the sound it should create, decide if it is combining with another letter in the word, and then focus on the next letter and repeat the process--all within a second or two! When children are not ready for the intense eye exercise that learning to read presents, they may get eye-aches and/or headaches. Many struggling readers I've worked with have told me that reading "hurts my head." Also, inside the ear is a fluid that helps regulate the vestibular system, which helps with both balance and control of the eye.
In order to prepare for the visual and neural workout that reading is you can encourage your preschoolers to engage in lots of large-muscle, gross-motor activities that require them to focus their eyes on lots of different things in rapid succession. Also encourage activities that activate the vestibular system, like rolling, turning somersaults, cartwheels, hanging upside down, climbing, swimming, skipping, and swinging. There was actually a time in our country when one of the requirements to pass kindergarten included physical activities like skipping! A child who can skip usually has the balance, eye strength, and neural coordination to handle the rapid foveal movements that you need for reading. When you add playground and gymnastic play into your schedule, you are not just getting physical exercise, you are also growing important pre-reading skills!
Also, crafts like this Owl Babies Craft are great for eye exercise and focus practice. You can also set up activities like this Find Your Name Breakfast Game for your kids to practice visual discrimination skills.
Here is some more reading on the Vestibular System & Ocular Development.
#5: Communication. Reading is a form of communication--it only becomes meaningful as children learn to communicate--to absorb and share information and ideas! Reading requires a strong working memory so that children can remember a word that they sounded out two minutes earlier or a sight word that they learned two days earlier. One easy way to strengthen working memory and improve communication skills is to tell stories with your children. You can tell them stories and encourage them to tell you stories! Encourage and help them develop intricate plots. Ask them what their main character is going to do next or how they felt about different events. Ask them to tell you stories they heard at church, or re-tell the events of their day during dinner or bed time. Let them exercise their memory muscles on a frequent basis with meaningful conversations about their lives! Also, point out letters, numbers, and print around you!
#6: Reading. Read to your child! Read! Read! Read! Read picture books and poetry books and classic literature and chapter books and anything else that you enjoy! Enjoy them with your preschooler! Building a love of books and reading is perhaps the most important part of a pre-reading lifestyle! It is the process that will motivate your preschooler to want to learn to read independently, and that desire to read is more important than memorizing all the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make. That desire is what will drive your child to put in the time to learn to read, which is absolutely vital to become a fluent reader.
You can pick out books with your preschooler, for your preschooler, or let them choose! If your 5-year old is bored with one book, let them move on to a different one. If your preschooler wants to "read" a picture book, encourage it! If your 3-year old want to stand on his head while you read, encourage it! You can actually combine all six focus areas if he stands on his head while you read and talk about the book!
While you read, sometimes look at the pictures and talk about them. Other times, move your finger under the words you read them. This help develop print awareness, or concepts about how printed books work (left to right, top to bottom, words separated by spaces, ideas separated by punctuation).
Some children seem born with a love affair with letters; others learn to enjoy reading because of shared reading experiences with a parent or caregiver they love.
If your preschooler is already obsessed with letters, encourage him or her with activities to spell his/her name and letter recognition games. Some kids might even enjoy writing in workbooks or notebooks. If your child is not interested in letters, absolutely do not stress it! You can still surround them with and expose them to letters (like in this construction game), but don't worry if they don't seem to remember the letters. When they are ready to read, they will learn the letters very quickly (check out Part 3 of this series for more details). You will notice that none of the 6 Focus Areas was to memorize all the letters in the alphabet. This is just not necessary to do before starting reading lessons, and it is certainly not as important as loving books and being able to identify sounds in a word. Reading will be easier if your child has seen all the letters and is ready to put a name label on them, but surrounding your kids with books and letting them see the letters as you read meets this need as well. You can also reinforce letters and sounds that your child is starting to recognize with activities like this Llama Llama Print Awareness Gross Motor Game or Say & Spray (gross motor letter and/or word recognition) or What's in the House? (actually, this activity can be customized for any skill you're working on).
Pre-Reading Focus Areas Rationale
You might be wondering how I chose the six focus areas for teaching pre-reading skills, so I'm going to tell you!
As I mentioned above, they are based on research about how children learn to read, my observations in teaching children to read and working with struggling readers, and my own experiences as a public school teacher and a mother of five children.
Here is a break-down of the "traditional" six pre-reading skills, and why I do not focus on them:
1- Vocabulary. I think this is too narrow of a focus. Yes, a large, strong vocabulary makes reading MUCH easier, but if you focus on communication skills (my #5) and read frequently to your preschoolers (my #6), your preschoolers will have a vocabulary that is wonderful.
2- Print Motivation. This is an interest and enjoyment of books. If you take the time to enjoy books with your children (my #6), they will develop print motivation...and a lot of other healthy skills too!
3- Print Awareness. Your children will develop this naturally as you enjoy books together (my #6 above).
4- Letter Knowledge. As I mentioned above, this is overrated in the preschooler's life. They absolutely do not need to know ALL the letters before they start learning to read, HOWEVER, if they have seen all the letters frequently, it will be much easier for them to learn the letters quickly when they are ready to read. My favorite reading programs actually introduce the letters 1-3 at a time as they focus on the sounds they make. And your children will pick up the letter knowledge they need as you read with them. At the same time, if your children enjoy learning about letters, absolutely do more letter-learning activities with them! Some kids even enjoy worksheets--if that is your children, let them do worksheets!
5- Narrative Skills. This is important, but it is also too narrow. Your child will develop narrative skills if you focus on communication skills (my #5) with him or her. Then, in addition to narrative skills, your child will also be a stronger communicator, a better reader, and a better writer.
6- Phonological Awareness. This is a big category that deserves its own attention. That is why it is #3 on my list above. :)
As you can see, the traditional six pre-reading skills are important, but some are too narrow and others can be combined with other skills. Additionally, these traditional pre-reading skills do not help children develop pattern and predictability skills, cause and effect skills, or a strong vestibular system with sufficient eye and ear balance to focus on print. My six areas of focus cover the traditional six and add in these important pre-reading areas.
As you add scheduled activities into your day, remember these two guidelines:
1- There is value in introducing new activities and skills into your child's day. This helps them create new frameworks with which they can interpret the world.
2- Preschoolers (and all children) learn best when they are happy. Especially with young children, it is never worth the potential "learning" to make them stop an activity they are enjoying just to "get in" reading skills before the day is over. If they are happily engaged in an activity of their choice, join them, and talk about what they're doing! You're now "getting in" reading and having fun with it.
Above all, enjoy spending time with your child and enjoy books during that time! As you notice your child acquiring the skills addressed above, use my checklist in Part 2 to see if it's time to begin formal reading lessons.
Happy Educating,
Carla
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KEYWORDS: pre-reading, how to teach reading
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