One of the best ways to improve early literacy skills is to allow children to make connections across a variety of texts. When a child reads the word ‘you’ in one book, but can’t remember the word when they come across it again, have the first book available to show to the child and let them know that they were able to read the word in that context. They will be able to retrieve the…
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When early readers begin to take on new literacy skills, it is important to remember that they need to assimilate a new rule into their repertoire before they can learn the variations on this rule. For example, when teaching young children that adding an ‘e’ to the end of a word turns a short vowel sound (a as in apple) into a long vowel sound (a as in cake), let them fully accomplish the use…
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For many Kindergarten students who are having difficulty learning how a letter looks, it is important to try many different types of reading strategies, including one that young children are great at—jumping around! For a Kindergarten student in Chelmsford, MA, I created a variation on the game Twister: I wrote letters on the spots, and when I called out “Put your foot on the letter that makes the sound [sound of the letter T],” the…
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In many preschool and Kindergarten classrooms, the relationship between how a letter looks and how it sounds is taught by showing the child pictures of objects, telling them the name of the object, and then telling them what letter the object starts with (‘cat’ starts with C, ‘dog’ starts with D). Some children just do not gain language acquisition in this way; what if they just can’t remember that ‘cat’ starts with C? When children…
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