Reading: Does it need to be taught?

                                                        

The simple answer is yes. Unlike other learning children go through during  their early stages of development, reading is something that needs to be taught. This is what makes teacher and caregiver involvement that much more important. 

This essential skill begins with a combination of child's ability to identify letters and the sounds they make. Reading is more than just reading. Learning to read involves the following:

Narrative Skills

For development of this skill, you can allow the child to be a storyteller. Stories can be told together too. You can begin by allowing the child to narrate the story using the pictures. Look at things like sequence. Do they understand the order of the events they are telling? Can you act out a story? 

Letter Knowledge:

Reading development is dependent on their understanding of the alphabetic principle. We must have letter knowledge to read. Connect letters and letter patterns to the sounds they make in spoken language.

Print Awareness:

Understanding the print (letters and words) hold a meaning. Look at things like what side of the page do you start reading? Indicating the direction is from left to right. Identify words are made up of letters, there are spaces between each word and punctuation at the end of a sentence.

Phonological Awareness:

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate spoken parts of a word. What is the child hearing? Practice making the sounds of words. Can they make connections with rhymes, syllables and phonemes? We can read stories and point out specific words as we go. 

Print Motivation

This is all about the love of books. Find books that excite the reader. If the book is about a topic the reader enjoys it can make reading print more enjoyable! If the story is engaging they will want to read more to find out what happens next.

Vocabulary:

This plays an important role in learning to read. Beginning readers must use words that they hear orally to make sense of the words they see in print. The more words they know the better. You can make learning new vocabulary fun by making connections with words. This involves looking at things like animals on a farm, things you can find on a beach, a shopping list etc.

Here is a video to share more on some of these topics and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oao6yvBCgCY