For reading, spelling and writing, children need to be fluent at recognising and writing letters and sounds with accuracy and automaticity.

Learning to Read

All words are made up of sounds. There are 44 sounds in the English language, but only 26 letters that are used to represent these sounds. This means that we need to combine letters to represent these extra sounds. For reading, spelling and writing, children need to be fluent at recognising and writing these sounds with accuracy and automaticity.  It is vital that children know these letter sounds. Once this has been established, children need to apply this letter sound knowledge to words. Children need to be able to blend sounds together for reading, and to decode words into their constituent sounds for spelling.

Research has demonstrated that the most important base skills for the development of reading is:

• Recognition of letters
• Letter to sound correlations eg the letter ‘F’ makes the ‘ffff’ sound
• Recognition of rhyming words
• Generation of rhyming words eg. a word that rhymes with ‘cat’ is ____ or rhymes with ‘cat’ starts with ‘p’ it is  ‘pat’
• The ability to manipulate sounds in words eg. The first sound in ‘dog; is ‘d’
• The ability to recognize syllables in words, or clap out syllables in words

As children get older their auditory memory and visual memory become more important.   Visual memory is particularly important for remembering sight words and word families.

Reading Comprehension

Essential to reading comprehension is the development of sound oral language skills.  Children with well developed vocabulary skills, who use well developed sentences and can recall and explain good stories are likely to have sound comprehension of stories they have read.  Before starting to read always discuss with the student what the story may be about based upon the title and the cover of the book.  This brainstorming process helps the child to draw on their world experience and knowledge of the topic that they are about to read about.  Comprehending what one has read is often about the process of connecting what we know about a topic to what we are reading.  This is how we make sense of a topic.

What Good Readers Do?

Good readers develop a number of reading habits and strategies which facilitates reading fluency and comprehension.   For young children it is important to foster their use of such strategies to facilitate their reading development and reading comprehension.  These include the following:

• Have a purpose for reading
• Think about what they already know
• Make sure they understand what they have read
• Look at pictures when possible
• Predict what will happen next
• Form pictures in their minds
• Draw conclusions about what they read
• Try to figure out new words
• Practice

More Information

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