Emergent Literacy: Reading

Did You Know?
“Reading aloud to young children is so critical that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that doctors prescribe reading activities along with other advice given to parents at regular check ups.”

Start Early, Finish Strong. U.S. Department of Education. America Reads Challenge, 1999.

Basic findings: What children need to acquire in order to learn to read.

• The ability to distinguish pictures from print.
• An awareness that once something is written it says the same thing no matter who reads it.
• An awareness of the left to right and the top to bottom progression of text.
• The knowledge that there are spaces between words.
• A familiarity with the configuration or basic structure of words.
• An awareness of the function of letters in the formation of words.
• The ability to pretend read, to tell the story from the pictures or from memory.
• Phonetic awareness, the understanding of the relationship between letters or groups of letters and the sounds they represent.
• The recognition of individual words. recognize spoken words as a sequence of sounds.

Tips for parents to encourage your child to learn to read:

1. Select age appropriate books from the public library or bookstore and read them with your children from birth for at least 30 minutes a day.
2. Talk about or discuss the book, pictures and ideas before reading the book.
3. Point out or ask questions about what the child sees before reading the page.
4. Pause so that the child can fill in a predictable word or phrase.
5. Make comments or carry on a conversation which relates the story to the child’s real personal experiences. Include books in the toy box so children can choose to look at them anytime.
6. Extend stories and written language into activities that relate to the child’s everyday life and have meaning.
7. Provide models in daily life to validate and give meaning to the printed word.
8. Fill your house with newspapers, books, magazines, signs, recipe cards, grocery lists, food labels, and calendars.
9. Provide many opportunities for children to interact with print like the items above and to handle manipulatives such as alphabet letters, word games, and toys.
10. Make frequent trips to your local public library to borrow print materials for your child, to borrow parenting books and videos and to attend family programs with your babies and preschool children.

Books:

Learning to Read and Write; developmentally appropriate practices for young children by Susan B. Neuman et al. National Association for the Education of Young Children. 2000.

Starting Out Right; a guide to promoting children’s reading success edited by Susan M. Burns. National Academy Press, 1999.

What Children Need in Order to Read by Marilyn Jaeger Adams. 30 min. DeBeck Educational Video, 1998.

Web Sites:

A Child Becomes a Reader. Birth to Preschool. npin.org/library/2003/n00862/n00862.html

Read me a story; reading checkup guide. American Academy of Pediatrics.
www.aap.org/family/readmeastory.htm

Information on this page reprinted with permission from the Urbana Free Library website: www.prairienet.org/buildingblocks/index.shtml.

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