Yesterday I was listening to Pea ramble on and on about princesses and all of things that being a princess entails. She was using some of her own Spanglish words in her descriptions,  and I was reminded of something I heard a couple of years ago on an airplane.  The man in the row behind me was traveling with two small kids.  Based on the conversation I could overhear, these kids were obviously very sharp.  One of the kids mentioned that someone had “shutted” the door.  The dad was quick to correct him–”It’s ‘shut’, not ‘shutted’.”

This dad’s heart was in the right place.  He obviously wanted his children to speak correctly, and that’s a good thing. But his method was a little off.  The better response would have been, “Yes, he ‘shut’ the door.”  See the difference?  The second method is called modeling,  where the correct past tense of the word “shut” is demonstrated for the child instead of making a correction of what the child said.

In this case, the kid was actually a lot smarter than the dad realized.  The child is becoming fluent in the English language and has realized that the usual way to make a word past tense is to add the -ed suffix to it.  He incorrectly applied this approach to the word “shut”, but that’s ok.  He just demonstrated that he has a firm grasp on one of the rules of our language.  Modeling the exception for him is a way to positively reinforce one of the many complicated exceptions to the rule without pointing out his error.

Modeling is a strategy commonly used with students who are learning a second language to correct them without making them self-conscious and accidentally discouraging them from continuing to practice.  It only makes sense to do the same thing to help encourage fluency in a small child who is learning his or her first language.

Better known as The Five Components of Reading, the Fab Five are the crucial instruments that research has shown kids need in order to become successful readers. Research is great . . . but are these really so important and are they necessary? My answer to both questions is a big resounding YES! Each one is important and they are absolutely necessary to teach so that your kids not only build a strong foundation of skills, but also continue to develop them in order to become accomplished readers that go on to do well in other subject areas.

Before I break down each of the Fab Five, it’s important to note that these components are not “steps to reading”. They are not meant to be introduced one at a time and mastered before moving on to the other. While it’s true that children will have to learn parts of some components before they can work on others, they are meant to work together throughout the process of learning to read. This means that you will be working on different aspects of the five components as your child’s skills grow. For example: Your child may need to work on some phonemic awareness skills before he/she can work on phonics. Yet another child can be working on vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension all at once in the same story. It may sound confusing at first, but you’ll get the hang of it once you see examples in the teaching methods and lesson ideas!

Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds of our language (phonemes). Often confused/used interchangeably with phonological awareness, this component is actually a subpart of phonological awareness.

• Not the same as phonics and does not involve print because this component is auditory
• Critical in laying the foundation for later letter-sound correspondence
• Example: (first sound isolation) What’s the first sound in the word sun?

Phonics: Developing an ability to correspond sounds (phonemes) with letters (graphemes).

• Leads to an understanding that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters
• Readers use the relationships to recognize familiar words and to decode unfamiliar ones
• One main difference between good and poor readers is the ability to use letter-sound correspondence to identify words

Vocabulary: The ability to understand and use words in our language in order to communicate through speech and writing. There are four different types of vocabulary:

• Listening vocabulary – the words needed to understand what is heard
• Speaking vocabulary – the words used when speaking
• Reading vocabulary – the words needed to understand what is read
• Writing vocabulary – the words used in writing

Fluency: The ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with prosody (with stress and intonation in your voice – not monotone).

• Should be automatic and effortless
• Acts as a bridge between recognizing words and comprehension
• Fluent readers use less mental energy on decoding (figuring words out) and more on comprehension (understanding what they read)

Comprehension: The cognitive ability to process and understand text that is read. It’s the ultimate goal and purpose of reading.

• Should be intentional and active
• Thinking strategies can be taught to improve comprehension

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness (PA) is the ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds in our language. Basically that means that kids should be able to hear, put together, and separate the sounds in spoken words.

• Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech – they are single sounds that hold no meaning on their own. For example: the sounds in the word “sat” are /s/ /a/ /t/. The sound /s/ by itself doesn’t mean anything until combined with /a/ and /t/ – to make a word.
• It is not the same as phonics because phonics uses print (letters to represent sounds) and PA is an auditory skill.
• It is best taught to children in kindergarten and first grade (ages 4-7). PA activities are broken up into age groups for you on the Lesson Ideas page, so that you’ll know when to teach which skills.
• PA is often confused with phonological awareness, but it is actually a subpart of it. More on phonological awareness later.

Why Do I Need To Teach Phonemic Awareness?

• PA lays the foundation for the understanding that sounds are represented by letters. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.
• It acts as a primer for kids to learn to read. Sure you can paint without a primer, but you’re more likely to see stains, patches, and chipping later on. It’s the same as seeing difficulties with decoding (figuring words out), reading fluently (quickly), or spelling correctly without PA!
• Our written language is difficult to decode (figure out). It has approximately 43 phonemes (sounds), yet we only have 26 letters to represent them – and those sounds are represented in about 250 different spellings (ex: the sound /j/ can be spelled j, g, dge).
• All of those different sounds can be difficult to figure out because we speak so quickly that it can be hard for kids to hear the single sound units. The sounds tend to blur together resulting in a child who pronounces train as chrain, or giraffe as graffe. This inability to hear each sound will be evident in their spelling later on.
• PA is a strong predictor of children who become good readers.

How Do I Teach Phonemic Awareness?

Ok, so now we get to the fun part . . . learning how to teach it.

• As important as PA is, you do not want to spend more than 10-15 minutes a day on PA skills.
• Many of these techniques and activities can (and should be) played as games – you can do them anywhere because you don’t need anything but your voices and ears!
• There are many PA skills, but research has shown that isolating, blending, and segmenting are the most important ones – so those are the ones we will focus on the most on this site. We will also cover phoneme deletion and substitution.

The following PA skills are listed in order of difficulty from easiest to hardest and should be introduced in this order so that your child can build upon his/her skills. Once you’ve introduced a skill and have given your child enough time to practice it, you can then move on and/or mix them up for additional practice if needed.

Isolating Phonemes

Isolating phonemes means just that . . . isolating and/or identifying a sound. It can be the initial sound (at the beginning), medial sound (in the middle), or the final sound (you guessed it – the last sound). However, you usually only work on one at a time because you don’t want to confuse your child. So you may want to start by working on initial sounds for a week (different activities/games each time, of course) and then final sounds the next week. Medial sounds are the hardest to isolate because they are the hardest to hear, so wait until your child has a good grasp on the other two before working on these. Here are some examples (remember that specific lessons will be found under PA in Lesson Ideas):

• Initial sound: What is the first sound you hear in the word sit? /s/
• Final sound: What is the last sound you hear in the word sit? /t/
• Medial sound: What sound do you hear in the middle of the word sit? /i/

Blending Phonemes

This is where you have kids put sounds together (blend) to make words. You do this without showing them any letters or writing – just by talking – so, you give them sounds and they make the words. This is one of the critical PA skills because it will be used to later blend written sounds together to figure out and read words (we’ll get to that in the phonics section). You can start off with just blending the initial sound to the rest of a word, then on to final sound, next blending syllables to make words, and finally individual sounds to make a word. Here are some examples:

• Blending initial sound: What word is /s/-un? sun
• Blending final sound: What word is ra – /t/? rat
• Blending syllables: What word is par – ty? party
• Blending words: What word is /m/ /a/ /n/? man

The cool part about these exercises is that once your kids get the hang of it, you don’t have to stick to easy words because they are not written – so you’re not expecting your kids to read them, just say them. This gives you a chance to practice with big and interesting words that will add to your child’s listening and speaking vocabulary – making them easier to add to their reading and writing vocab later on!

Phoneme Segmentation

This one is a little harder for kids to do, so don’t expect them to master it right away. The object here is to get them to split the sounds of a word apart (the opposite of blending) – so you give them a word and they give you the sounds. This PA skill will also help them decode words, but will be even more helpful when they learn to spell and write. Here you want to start with smaller words before you move on to larger words. Here’s an example:

• Segmenting phonemes:
• (easy word) What are the sounds in the word bus? /b/ /u/ /s/
• (harder word) What are the sounds in the word rich? /r/ /i/ /ch/
• (even harder) What are the sounds in the word boiling? /b/ /oi/ /l/ /i/ /ng/

Remember that the purpose here is to have your child split up each individual sound, not to split the word into syllables! This is why it’s so hard for kids to do this one – they want to give you the syllables or just split the first sound. For example, here are some typical responses you’ll get from a child that has poor PA when asked to segment the word boiling:

/boil/ /ing/ or /b/ /oil/ /ing/ or /b/ /oi/ /ling/

You may be asking yourself – “so what, why does it matter?” It matters because it means that they can’t hear them as individual sounds. When you work on phonics, reading, and spelling later on it will be much easier for them to identify and spell these individual sounds if they know them before hand – again, you’re laying a critical foundation that will make it easier for them to read. These kids who know them spend less time figuring words out and more time on meaning, which equals better comprehension!

Adding, Deleting, and Substituting Phonemes

These PA skills involve changing the sounds of a word to make new words. These are the hardest of the PA skills because they’re not things that we naturally do with language unless we’re taught. While these are important skills to have, I haven’t included many of these in the PA section of our lessons. In my experience (and humble opinion), I have found these to be more effective when used as phonics instruction with the addition of letters and manipulatives, rather than just as an auditory skill. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t practice these, I would just focus more on blending and segmenting phonemes at first. Here are some examples:

Adding phonemes:

• (initial sound) What word do you get when you add the sound /m/ to eat? meat
• (final sound) What word do you get when you add the sound /d/ to car? card

Deleting phonemes:

• (initial sound) What word do you get when you take away the sound /s/ in snap? nap
• (final sound) What word do you get when you take away the final sound /t/ in tent? ten

Substituting phonemes:

• (initial sound) Change the sound /c/ in cat to /b/ – what word do you get? bat
• (final sound) Change the last sound /t/ in pet to /n/ -w hat word do you get? pen
• (medial sound – these are hard!) Change the middle sound /e/ in pen to /a/ – what word do you get? pan

Ok, are you still with me? Congratulations . . . you have just been through Phonemic Awareness 101! As I said before, you need not learn all of these at once, so take your time. You can pace yourself and your lessons based on how well your child does with each skill. Remember that you should make these daily lessons and practice sessions fun and quick!

For lesson ideas with detailed directions and activities for each skill, please visit our Lesson Ideas page!

References

You may have memories of learning phonics in school and being continuously drilled on letter sounds and spelling rules until you thought you would explode. Or you may be a product of whole language instruction (like me) and have very little knowledge of the intricate workings of our written language – you know how to read and write, but you’re not sure how it all works. It just depends on when and where you went to school. So which way is best? Recent research has shown that along with phonemic awareness instruction, both phonics and whole language instruction is best. You can read more about the differences between the two and why they should work together in this article. Either way, phonics instruction has come a long way since we were in school and there are ways to make it fun! So let’s get started on what you need to know to teach your child phonics.

We’re going to cover the basics of teaching phonics in three sections:

• A – Learning About Letters and Sounds: teaching the connection between the letter symbol and the sound
• B – Blending Words: beginning to use knowledge of letter sounds to read words
• C – Reading Connected Text: moving from reading single words to reading (previously learned) words in a passage or book

A – Learning About Letters and Sounds

To be able to teach the sounds of the letters, you also have to teach your child the letters of the alphabet. There are a couple of ways to do this and the final decision of how you want to do this is up to you. Although I find that the research-based practice works best, I will share with you some info about the two commonly used methods and let you make the decision that best suits you and your child. Then we’ll continue on our merry phonics way.

• Learn the letters , then learn their sounds: This is based on researchers’ findings that children do better in learning their sounds once they have a solid foundation in letter recognition. The fancy terms for this are Alphabetic Knowledge (learning the names and shapes of letters) and Alphabetic Principle (an understanding that letters represent the sounds of our spoken language and knowledge of those sounds).

1. Letter Recognition: This means kids can easily identify and name all of the letters in the alphabet. Singing or reciting the alphabet alone doesn’t count. Can your child consistently identify and name any letter (upper and/or lower case) when shown in random order? If not, then they need to work on letter recognition activities. Fluent (automatic) letter recognition can be achieved through the explicit, yet fun and quick letter activities on our site that you can use every day! You can find the specific lessons on introducing the alphabet and other letter recognition activities under Phonics in Lesson Ideas. Note: Some experts advise you to teach the lower case letters first because they account for most of the letters that we read in text and books. However, it’s important to note that lower case letters are also more difficult to tell apart because many of the curves and lines used to make them look similar (ex: m, n, h; c, o; d, b; i, j; p, q). Upper case letters tend to be easier for kids to identify and write. Teaching both upper and lower case letter names and shapes at the same time can help avoid confusion. Again, this is another decision for you based on what will work best for your child and/or what your chosen program dictates.
2. Letter-Sound Correspondence: This refers to the matching of letter symbols to their corresponding sounds in order to learn how to blend, read, and spell words. Once your child has a strong grasp on letter recognition, they are ready to learn their sounds. There are many activities that you can (and should) do daily to help reinforce your child’s understanding of letter sounds – and we’re happy to share our collection of these with you here. But you may be wondering just how you should introduce the sounds and in what order. The following is a sample sequence for sound introduction based on findings that say you should teach the most commonly used sounds first since kids will encounter and use them the most. This will also allow you to practice blending with your child earlier because you will be able to make more words with these sounds. Note: It’s not necessary for your child to know all of the sounds before you start blending! This is just an example – you can, of course, use any sequence you like: S, M, D, P, short A, T, H, short O, B, N, L, C, short I, R, G, short U, F, J, W, K, short E, Y, V, Q, Z, X. Then you can introduce the long vowels, digraphs (letter combinations that make a new sound: sh, th, ch, wh, tch) and diphthongs (vowels combinations that make a new sound: oi, au, ou

• Letter of the week: In the past, this format was quite popular – where in you start with “A” and do every activity under the sun with the letter for that week (paint it, sing songs using that sound, glue macaroni to an A, cut out pictures that start with an “A”, eat an apple, etc.) and continue on in a similar manner with the other letters of the alphabet. While this can be great fun, research has shown that it’s not the best method because learning the letter name and sound at the same time is too much, so children don’t really learn to internalize them (which means they tend to forget what letter is called what and what sound it makes). Some programs out there still use this method, so if you chose to go this route just keep in mind that it may not work for ALL children. Some may do just fine and successfully learn all letters and their sounds, while others may need more support and time.

B – Blending Words

Once your child has learned the sounds of some letters they are ready to blend those sounds into words and begin reading! We’re first going to cover the steps for blending words sound by sound, and then we’ll go on to blending bigger words and sentences.

• Blending Words: This is an important technique that teaches your child how to figure out unknown words by putting together known sounds to make words. This is how your child will initially learn to read. Once he/she is a reader, they can use the blending technique as a tool to figure out unknown words. This is what phonics is all about! It is to be used as a launching point for beginning to read and as a “fall back” tool when encountering hard words. So here are the steps you want to use when first teaching your child to blend sounds into words (directions for blending words after this initial method follow below). Please read through them first and then make sure you view the video to see it in action. It can be confusing at first – but you’ll both get the hang of it quickly! I will use the example letters of “m”, short “a”, and “p”. You should use a white board, chart paper, or any other large surface to write on during instruction so that it’s easy for your child to see and for you to point to.

1. Write the letter “m” on the board, point to the letter, and ask “sound?” Your child should say “/mmmmm/”.
2. Write the letter “a” on the board next to the “m”, point to the letter, and ask “sound?” Your child should say “/aaaaa/”.
3. Dip your finger under the “m” and “a” making a connecting motion and say “blend”. Your child should say “/ma/”
4. Next write the letter “p”, point to the letter, and ask “sound?” Your child should say /p/.
5. Dip your finger again under all three letters from “m” to “p” and say “blend”. Your child should say slowly “/map/”.
6. Run your finger quickly under the word and ask “word?” Your child should quickly read the word “map”. This final quick repetition of the word is necessary to help your child build fluency and help make the word become more automatic.

• These steps may sound funny and robot-like at first, yet they are how you will initially teach your child to blend. It’s really important that you model and show your child how you will do this and practice it until you are both comfortable. Once your child gets used to the visual cues you use with your hand (pointing to the letter, dipping your finger, and sweeping under the word), you can then remove your word prompts (sound?, blend, sound?, etc.) and just use your hand cues. Once your child learns more sounds and is good at blending words sound by sound, you can then move on to whole word blending.
• Whole Word Blending: This is where you write the whole word and point to each sound as your child blends the word slowly. Then sweep your hand quickly underneath the word while your child reads the word quickly. You can also use whole word blending when reading bigger words by splitting words up into syllables and having your child blend them to read the word.
• Blending Sentences: Your child can work on this once they get the hang of whole word blending. Write a simple sentence on the board or chart (you should use a sentence that appears in a book you are about to introduce to your child or are currently reading with them) making sure that you use correct capitalization and punctuation. You may not think that this matters yet because your child can’t read – but it does! Check out this info on Concepts of Print to see why. Begin having your child blend and/or read each word before attempting to read the sentence to make sure they won’t get stuck on a word. Once they know all of the words, have him/her go back and start from the beginning to blend the sentence slowly. Finally, have your child reread the sentence quickly. The final reading of the sentence should be quick, fluid, and sound natural.
• You may read this and wonder why your child has to read and reread the words and sentences so many times. The repeated readings of the same words help your child gain fluency with these words and with the process of blending and reading words in general. Fluent reading is a key component to having great comprehension because your child will be able to focus more on meaning than on how to figure out what the words say. Besides, kids love repetition and they become so proud of themselves when they are able to read a whole chart of words by themselves! So while this initial blending sounds tedious, it’s important to remember that your goal is to give your child the tool of being able to blend the word “cat” so that one day when he/she encounters the word “catastrophe”, they’ll know what to do! Remember to keep it quick and fun!

C – Reading Connected Text

This basically means that you will give your child the chance to practice reading the words that they have recently learned to blend and read in a real book. By doing so, you are having them connect practice words with real reading in a real book known as a decodable book. Practicing with and reading decodable books does wonders for your child’s ability to improve his/her fluency and confidence in reading! Many of the phonics based curricula that are out today make it very easy for you to teach in this way because decodable books are included in the materials. If you are making your own curriculum, there are some great decodable book libraries you can purchase with books that practice target sounds. Whether you are using one of these programs or you are creating your own reading curriculum, you can use the following steps for having your child read connected text.

1. Choose a decodable book that focuses on words with the sounds your child has been working on. Programs usually have a ready made sequence for this. If working with your own materials, you may want to plan out a sequence for letter sound introduction and match the decodable books with that sequence.
2. Offer plenty of opportunities for your child to practice blending and reading words from the book before letting them read the book. You can also make flashcards, use letter tiles to build the words, and/or and play other games with the words to help them practice.
3. Choose 1 or 2 sentences from the book to practice blending. You can play a “hunt for the special sentence” game with them while reading the book – they love looking for and finding the sentence they practiced!
4. Introduce the book by reviewing title, author and illustrator, doing a quick picture walk, and having them predict what they think it will be about.
5. Begin reading the book with them. You can start off by reading the book to them, then taking turns reading pages, and finally having them read the book to you. During and after the readings, make sure to discuss their ealier predictions and/or interesting parts of the story. I know that decodable books don’t have a lot of “meat” to them, but this helps to get them in the habit of discussing books. You can learn more detailed info about introducing books to your child in our Pre Reading Activities section of Teaching Methods!

Whew! That was a lot to learn. Consider yourself an expert on Phonics 101! You can find some fun and detailed phonics lessons in our Phonics section of Lesson Ideas.

References

Fluency … the great bridge. Fluency acts as the bridge between decoding words and comprehending what they mean. But what does fluency mean? Here’s the National Reading Panel’s official definition:

Fluency: The ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression.

Fluent reading should be effortless and sound as natural as speech. This can be difficult for many children when they lack the ability to recognize words quickly enough to make them flow. This can lead to problems that affect a child’s comprehension of a text because when a child spends too much energy and attention on trying to figure out what a word says they don’t have much energy left for figuring out its meaning. Below is a list of characteristics that less fluent readers share:

• often read word by word
• may sometimes skip or repeat words
• group words together in a way that doesn’t sound like natural speech so they sound choppy
• reading aloud is slow, labored, and often times monotone
• comprehension is usually not there

Why don’t some children learn to be fluent readers? Here are some possible reasons:

• they don’t fully understand or have a handle on connecting sounds and letters
• they lack the ability to automatically decode words due to lack of practice
• they may lack phonemic awareness (awareness of the sounds in our language)
• poor vocabulary
• not enough practice reading text

This is why phonics instruction is so important – phonics provides your child with the ability and tools to decode words. But fluency isn’t just about reading words and passages quickly – it’s not something that you start to work on or worry about once your child starts reading books or is in third grade. Fluency practice should begin when you’re first teaching your child to recognize/name letters and to learn their sounds. They should learn to do this quickly and accurately so that they can later read words and thus books as effectively. So what can you do to teach your child to read fluently? There are several ways you can do this – and the more fun you have with reading, the more interested they’ll be in participating!

Read Aloud

I can’t stress enough how beneficial this simple act is for your children! You can read detailed info on reading aloud here, but for now we’ll just focus on how it affects fluency. Your read alouds act as a model for good reading. It’s where your child hears how reading is supposed to sound: quick, without mistakes, and full of expression. You should read books with plenty of emotion and try changing up your voice for different characters. Not only does this make it more fun for your child, it also motivates them to read and to want to sound like you do when they try it. You should also point out to your child the fact that your voice changes when you read and show them how different (and boring) you would sound if you read it monotone. Have them practice changing up their own voice while reading so they can feel and hear the difference for themselves.

Tons of Practice

Practice, practice, practice! To pactice means to continually work on something in order to improve. This shouldn’t be surprising as this fits with almost anything in life! So in reading this means to do repeated readings. Repeated readings of the same text has been shown by research to greatly improve fluency. Here are some findings on repeated readings:

• children get multiple exposure to words and spelling patterns
• can help increase reading rate
• kids can practice their reading strategies to improve comprehension
• reinforces decoding skills
• can be really motivating because kids can see that they get better with each reading
• works with older kids as well as younger ones

It’s a good thing kids love to read the same books over and over again. Now you can take comfort in the fact that they’re learning lots – not just memorizing- when they ask you to read them that book again.

Read A Different Way

Ok, so even the most fun book can be become boring when you read it the same way every time. That’s why changing up the way you or your child reads a book can really help. Here are some different ways you can try reading:

• Partner read: take turns reading sections or pages
• Choral Reading: read it at the same time so that your child can practice keeping up with you
• Echo Reading: (this works best with young kids and easy books but can be tried by all) You read a sentence (with lots of emotion) then they repeat after you trying to copy your tone and expression
• Read along with a tape: another way to listen to good models of reading
• Reader’s Theater: (this can work well if you are part of a co-op or your child has friends to do this with) you can use poetry, speeches, plays, or your child can write a play based on a story they have read

Changing up the way your child reads a story can be an easy way to sneak in some repeated reading for kids who don’t enjoy reading the same selection more than once. Have fun with it!

Check out more ideas for teaching Fluency in our Lesson Ideas page!

References

Words, words, words! The more words your child knows, the better reader he or she will become. The great news is that you don’t have to wait until your child is of reading age to start building the vocabulary they will need in order to be great readers. This is because there are four different kinds of vocabulary that we use in our lives: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Studies show that children with larger listening and speaking vocabularies experience greater comprehension, therefore success as readers than children with a more limited listening and speaking word bank. This is because a child can know the meanings of thousands of words without having to know what they look like or how to spell them. Once they know the meaning of a word or a concept, they can just attach that knowledge to the visual representations (the words) later on as they are exposed to them in reading and writing. This large listening/speaking word bank helps them be more efficient readers because they don’t have to spend time learning to read the word and the meaning, they just have to learn to attach a known meaning to a new word.

Building this important word bank is easier than you think and it started the day your child was born! To build your child’s listening and speaking vocabulary here are two very important things you can do:

• Talk, talk, talk! Speak to your child as much as you can about everything you can. Even babies love to hear the sound of your voice, so just gab away about anything. With toddlers and older kids, you can make a conscious effort to explain things to your kids in detail and use a lot of descriptive words. Don’t be afraid to use big words! Many of us tend to water our conversations down with young kids because we think they won’t understand big words. They will learn them just like they learn the smaller words … you explain the meanings and use them repeatedly in your conversations. Remeber that you’re not expecting your child to read or write these words yet, just listen to them and maybe use them when they speak.
• Read, read, read! Read aloud to your kids as much as they’ll stand it. This is important for a number of reasons, but it can be extremely helpful in developing your child’s listening/speaking vocabulary. Reading aloud to your child will give you opportunities to expose them to words we may not use everyday, as well as to the common ones we do use. Especially if you choose books that are of high interest to your child. Does your child love tigers? Don’t just read a children’s book that’s on their level to them – read them an article in a National Geographic magazine, a children’s encyclopedia, and/or a book meant for older children that has harder words in it – they don’t have to be able to read them, just you. Sure you may have to stop reading to discuss words and what certain concepts mean – but that’s just another opportunity to talk and learn more. It’s a win win situation!

As for your child’s reading and writing vocabulary, there are many wonderful activities that you can do to help them build these word banks – and we’re happy to share some with you in our Lesson Ideas section! But let’s first take a closer look at research findings and methods behind these activities so that you can maximize your ability to teach your child a vast vocabulary and also provide them with the tools to learn new words on their own. The remainder of this section will cover the following things you’ll need to know:

• Types of Words
• Which Words To Teach
• Word Learning Strategies
• Word Study

Types of Words

Now I’m not talking about different parts of speech here. I’d like to share with you something about words that we all know, but don’t really think about. It’s important to be aware of this though when teaching our children new vocabulary words because you want to make sure you spend your time wisely and choose words that will make the most difference in your child’s learning. These “types of words” relate back to what I just shared with you about listening/speaking/reading/writing vocabulary. Take a minute to think about the words in your vocabulary. Many people tend to think that words fall in either a “know” or “don’t know” category – but the truth is that words fall into many categories. Below is a chart showing the many categories that our children’s vocabulary may fall into.

words we know – by sight, meaning, and reading

words we’ve heard but don’t know the meaning of

words we’ve seen but don’t know the meaning of and/or haven’t heard of

words we’ve heard of and know the meaning of, but haven’t seen or know how to read

words we don’t know anything about

Since you spend the most time with your child, you’re more likely to be aware of what their vocabulary is like. And if you’re not sure, you can simply make a chart to keep track of words your child encounters during your lessons so that you will know which ones he/she needs to focus on and what aspects of the word they need to work on. Just use the categories above to make your chart and plug words in as you work with your child – they can help you! When he/she gets to a word they don’t know (whether you’re doing the reading or they are), ask them which category you should put the word in. This can be a great way to use your child’s knowledge base to drive your instruction, and it makes a handy tool for lesson planning.

Which Vocabulary Words Should I Teach?

Whether you decide to keep track of your child’s vocabulary knowledge or not, you may still wonder what vocabulary words you should choose from the stories or selections you’ll be reading with your child. If you are working with a structured curriculum, the vocabulary words may have already been chosen for you for each lesson. If you are creating your own curriculum, then you will be the one choosing the words to teach so you will want to choose the ones that will benefit your child the most. So how can you tell which ones are most useful? Glad you asked!

According to Isabel Beck, author and leading researcher of vocabulary instruction, there are 3 levels, or tiers of words that we typically teach. I will break down her findings and suggestions about these tiers for you here.

• Tier 1 Words: These are words that are pretty easy to understand and are used a lot in everyday interaction. Your child has probably had these common words in their listening/speaking vocabulary for a while and therefore will be very easily transfered into their reading/writing vocabulary. Examples include: house, play, job, sad, hurt, begin, etc. Beck maintains that a reading teacher should not spend much time trying to “teach” these words because they are probably known concepts to your child. You need only give them opportunity to match their knowledge to the word. Sometimes words may seam like a good choice because they are big words and might seem hard to learn. Main point: if your child knows the meaning already, don’t spend too much time on it and don’t choose to highlight it as a vocabulary word for a selection.
• Tier 2 Words: These are classified as words that we will need to be mature readers and that will help us expand our understanding of things that we may encounter on any given day. So in one sense they are common words and concepts, yet they make our vocabularies richer and help to improve our comprehension. These words are often times linked to previously known concepts as well – they just may be a fancier way of saying something we already know. Examples include (synonyms for the above tier 1 examples): dwelling, interact, performance, melancholy, injured, initiate, etc. Main point: Beck states that these are the words we should spend most of our time teaching because they help our children create a richer and more mature vocabulary!
• Tier 3 Words: These are words that are very content specific and are not used on a daily basis. They may be very important to know so that a reader can understand specific material, yet they do not need to be mastered or internalized unless they are to be used in one’s daily vocabulary. Examples include: stalactites abscission, decacordon, monomer, Main point: The author by no means says that these words aren’t important or that we shouldn’t teach them, she just merely points out that they should only be taught if they are necessary in order to understand the selection you’re working on.

So when you’re going over a selection choosing or reviewing the given vocabulary, keep these tier words in mind. Carefully chosen words can really help to maximize your instructional time and make your child’s learning more meaningful!

Word Learning Strategies

While your child may learn tons of words from you just by hearing you speak and listening to you read, many words still have to be taught. There are literally thousands of good ideas out there for teaching your child vocabulary words. We have some too and you can check them out in our vocabulary section of Lesson Ideas! Yet it’s really important that you teach your child the strategies they need to learn words on their own. Dictionaries are nice (and necessary to use sometimes), but we definitely don’t carry them around in our back pockets and neither will our kids. So here are the easiest word learning strategies that you can teach your kids.

• Context Clues: This is the most commonly used because it’s the easiest. Show your kids how to search for clues in the words or sentences surrounding the unknown word.

For example: Jenny felt apprehensive about moving to a new neighborhood where she didn’t know anyone. She was nervous about getting lost and not making any new friends.

You can go through and pick out words or phrases that give clues: “new neighborhood”, “didn’t know anyone”, “nervous”, and “lost” are all good because you can discuss how that would make them feel. You want to model this first a few times until your child knows what to do and then you can have them do the clue searching.

• Word Structure: This strategy is useful when you can look at the parts of the word itself for clues. Of course, this will usually only work once you have taught your child about affixes and word origins (more on that below). Teach your child to look at word parts for any clues to the meaning of the unknown word.

For example: incomprehensible

prefix: in = not, base: comprehend = understand, suffix: ible = able to

• Apposition: This is a fancy word for saying that the definition is included in the sentence itself. Many content area subjects, such as science and history, will do this in their selections. Although this one seems like a no-brainer to us adults, kids tend to overlook them. You just have to show your child that they exist and how to spot them. The definition of the word is usually set apart from the rest of the sentence by commas. For example:

The bees swarmed, or crowded around, the hive.

These are three really easy strategies you can teach your kids to help them learn words on their own. Not only will it help them save time by looking up words they don’t know in a dictionary, but it also helps them develop their decoding skills.

Word Study

The English language has many predictable spelling patterns, some irregular words and exceptions, and quite a few words that come from different languages. These factors tend to make learning to read and write our language difficult for many kids. Luckily, we can teach many of these patterns, irregularities, and word origins to our kids so that they’ll pose less of a problem for them when they read. That’s what Word Study is all about. Here is a list of the type of lessons that are covered in our Word Study section. You can find specific lessons with instructions in our Word Study section of Lesson Ideas – they’ll be broken down by grade level.

• Antonyms: opposite or ear opposite meanings (off/on)
• Synonyms: similar meanings (nice/kind)
• Base Word Families: words that share the same base word (
• Prefixes: letter(s) attached to the front of a base word that changes its meaning (
• Suffixes: letter(s) attached to the end of a base word that changes its meaning (selfish)
• Homographs: words that are spelled the same but have different meanings and sounds, for instance “bow”
• homophones: words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings such as “read” and “red”
• Homonyms: words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings such as “bank”
• Word derivations (word origins/languages they came from): words that come from other languages but become part of the English language. An example is
• Compound words: words made up of two or more other words (“street car”)
• Analogies: pairs of words that share a relationship. For example “finger is to hand as toe is to foot“

For specific lesson activities, check out the Vocabulary section of our Lesson Ideas.

References

Comprehension is THE ultimate goal of reading! Everything we teach our kids in reading is so that they will end up having comprehension, or an understanding of what they read. We spend so much time learning how to read just to get to the point where we can read to learn. Comprehension = knowledge. But just because comprehension is our ultimate goal doesn’t mean that you need to wait till your kids are older or have “mastered” everything else in reading before you teach it.

Some people tend to think that comprehension is something that’s focused on only in later grades – not so! You can start teaching comprehension as soon as your child is able to talk about what you read to him/her. Having said that, I’d like to clear something up before we dive into the how-to’s of comprehension. It’s very common to pick up a piece of reading curriculum that has questions written at the end of the text/selection and get excited because it “covers comprehension”. Asking questions during and/or after a reading is fine and very useful in gauging comprehension, but it is NOT the same as teaching it. Teaching comprehension is a process that involves more than just asking questions about the characters, plot, or main idea of a book or story. I’m going to break down the basics of teaching comprehesion for you in the following sections – you can get specific lessons in the Comprehension section of Lesson Ideas.

Pre-, During, and Post Reading Activities:

• Prior Knowledge: Take a minute to think about the books that you read as an adult. You probably tend to pick out books that are about things you like or that have been recommended to you by a friend. Combine that with about 20, 30, or more years of prior knowledge that living life has offered you and you probably go into a book already knowing a fair amount about the content that may be found inside its pages. Our kids oftentimes don’t have this luxury, so we have to help them out by providing them with knowledge about a topic before reading about it. This is known as “building background knowledge”. For example you wouldn’t want to read Anne Frank’s Diary to your child without first going over some facts about the The Holocaust (discussing it, watching a video, visiting a museum, etc.). This isn’t to say that you will cover everything about the given topic – you definitely want to leave much of the learning about something for the reading of the selection/book. You just want to make sure that you give them a starting point so they’re not totally lost when reading about it.

• Asking Questions: This is an obvious one that most people know to do during and after a reading. But many don’t know about the usefulness of asking questions before you read a book. This can really help them maintain a focus as it sets a purpose for them to read. For example: before reading The True Story About The Three Little Pigs, you may ask your child “I wonder how this is different than the regular book? What do you think we’ll learn is true in this story? (let them make some guesses) Let’s see if you can find out what the truth is.” Taking a couple of minutes to do this pre -read questioning will go a long way because your child will have a goal in their head and they have to “hunt” for the answers. This works especially well when you give them the chance to choose the book they want to read – the motivation will be there from the beginning!

• Picture Preview (if applicable): Kids love to look at the pictures in a book before they read. It’s their version of how we check out the back cover of a book before reading to see if it catches our interest. It’s also another way to get them thinking about what they will read about and/or get some pre-reading questions in. Here’s a simple rule for picture previews: Fictional books … let them explore the pictures and pages (without reading the text) up to a certain point so they won’t spoil a possible surprise ending. For non-fiction … let them see all of it.

• Discussions: Have you ever seen a movie and not quite gotten it or felt like you missed something important? But then while talking about it with a friend, they point out something someone said or did and you suddenly “got it”. And then maybe when you watched it again you picked up on stuff you missed the first time. That’s what discussions after a reading do for our kids. Now by discussion, I don’t mean for you to ask them a bunch of questions, I mean talk about it – what happened and why, what the characters were like, what would you have done in their position(s), did you like the ending, etc.. That’s not to say you can’t ask questions, just try to use them to lead into a discussion rather than having a question/answer session. Not only can this be really fun (they come up with the wildest things), but you can really use it to gauge your child’s progress and to let you know what you should focus on during the next reading to help them “get it” better.

Skill and Strategy Instruction These make up the “meat and potatoes” part of teaching comprehension. It’s important to know that skills and strategies are not the same and that they are both important to teach so that your child can maximize their comprehension of a story, article or book. There are 11 skills and 7 seven strategies that have been shown by research to be very effective in improving children’s comprehension. You want to focus your attention of skill and strategy instruction both during and after a reading, but you don’t want to do too much at once. So here’s an example of how you can break them up into different readings per story/book : First Read: Might include reading it together and taking turns, or you reading aloud to them as they follow along – Choose 2-3 strategies to focus on and model them throughout the reading. Second Read: Choose 1 skill to focus on. Introduce/review the skill before the read. Have them try reading the selection aloud to you pausing to practice the skill when the opportunity is right. Discuss and practice the skill after the read. Third Read: For extra fluency practice – If they can, have them read it independently or you can try a new way of reading like I discussed in the Fluency article. (Note: this suggestion works best with stories, articles and short books – if reading chapters books, you can alternate skill/strategy instruction by chapter depending on the content)

Skills: These can be defined as the things kids need to know in order to connect with and understand what an author is trying to say in a book, story, or article. They help kids organize the information in a text so they can connect with the author’s message and comprehend it. Focused mostly on after a reading (depending on the skill).

• Main Idea and Details
• Author’s Purpose
• Cause and Effect
• Fantasy vs Reality
• Classifying and Categorizing
• Author’s Point of View
• Drawing Conclusions
• Making Inferences
• Sequencing
• Comparing and Contrasting
• Fact and Opinion

Strategies: These are the tools that we use in our heads while we’re reading that help us make sense of things and/or help us read better. The thing is that most of us aren’t even aware that we do these things so we don’t think to teach them. To teach these you basically have to pretend that you’re opening up your mind so that your child can “see” how you think. The idea here is to model the way you think and understand things and show your child how to do the same so that he/she can eventually do this on his/her own. The following strategies were written by the authors of SRA’s Open Court Reading Program and were based on research about how kids learn to read and comprehend.

• Summarizing
• Predicting
• Monitoring and Clarifying
• Visualizing
• Asking Questions
• Monitoring and Adjusting Reading Speed
• Making Connections

Comprehension isn’t something that just happens over night, it’s something that’s developed with time and purposeful practice. Be sure to check out the Comprehension section of Lesson Ideas for more detailed ideas on these comprehension activities, skills, and strategies!

References