Get Your Preschooler Ready to Read
Look for these signs of progress in your pre-reader.
The key components of reading readiness include:
- Familiarity with print and books: It's important for your child to know that people read words, not pictures, and that the words she sees in print are related to the words she speaks and hears.
Reading milestones:- Recognizing print in everyday life, on cereal boxes, street signs, and more
- Holding a book, turning the pages, and pretending to read
- Asking questions and making comments that show she understands what you read to her
- Letter recognition: The more letters your child is able to instantly recognize and name by the time he starts kindergarten, the quicker he'll be able to focus his attention on other tasks such as the sounds associated with each letter.
Reading milestones:- Singing the ABC song
- Recognizing the shape of letters
- Starting to learn the sounds of letters: "B" makes the "buh" sound
- Sounds of speech: Technically called "phonological awareness," this is the ability to discern the sounds in words. Word play is key to phonological awareness because it entails listening to the way words sound and recognizing how they change.
Reading milestones:- Identifying letters and realizing that they represent the segments of her own speech
- Understanding that "dog" does not rhyme with "cat"
- Clapping out syllables in familiar and unfamiliar words — cow/boy, ro/de/o
- Phonemic awareness: Before children learn to read print, they need to understand that words are made up of speech sounds, technically called phonemes. The 44 phonemes in the English language are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word's meaning.
Reading milestones:- Naming several words that begin with the same sound — bat, boy, and bell
- Replacing one sound with another — replace the first sound in pig with /d/ to make dig.
What Your Child Should Know by Age 5
Since we will soon be having many birthdays, here are some developmental milestones you should be looking for as your child turns five years old.
Reading Development: - Enjoys being read to and pretends to read aloud from a book
- Can produce rhymes
- Knows most letters and can match some letters to the sounds they make
- Can match some written and spoken words
- Can write some letters and numbers
- Likes to retell simple stories and asks questions about books
Language Development:
- Uses more description in conversations
- Sentences are sometimes six words or longer, with combined phrases
- Knows the name for most common objects
- Can count to 10 and knows basic colors
- May tell riddles and jokes (and will definitely find them funny!)
- Understands opposites, such as big and little or up and down (and yes and no, of course!)
Physical Development:
- Can swing by himself
- Can bounce and catch a ball
- Can build a tower with blocks (and can knock them down again!)
- Can hop on one foot and may skip
- Can draw simple stick figure or face
Emotional Development:
- Can take turns and share (but doesn’t always want to!)
- Prefers to play in smaller groups and may try to exclude others
- Wants to feel grown up and can feel proud or embarrassed easily
- Has a beginning sense of right and wrong
- Can organize pretend play and invent games with other children
- Read together every day. Find a time of day when your child is most able to settle down, such as before naps or after a bath. If he loses interest, stop and try again later. The aim to spend a total of 20 minutes each day reading with him (all at once or in chunks).
- Ask questions. Ask your child things about the story that can be answered from looking at the pictures. Have her point out differences in the shapes of letters; this will prepare her to identify them as she learns to read on her own.
- Do it together. Make your child feel that the books are really for him. Let him help choose books to buy and which ones to read. Ask him to hold the book or turn the pages as you sit together.
- Point to words. Use your finger to help her follow the text as you read it. Pause at a word she might already know and let her say it.
- Read it 101 times. Reading his favorite book again and again (and again) actually helps him begin to recognize repeated words. It also helps him become familiar with the structure of a story.
- Try picture reading. Even before she can read any words, encourage your child to read to you from the pictures. Look for books with bright, lively illustrations that offer good clues to the text such as Fidgety Fish by Ruth Galloway.
- Read it by heart. If he's memorized a favorite story, guide him to follow the text as he recites it. Eventually, he'll associate a spoken word with the written one.
information above is abbreviated from Scholastic
