READING SKILLS
Reading skills are interwoven but for ease of explanation they are being explained separately.
Accuracy
Fluency
Comprehension
However before delving into the technicalities and skills involve, the desire to read and interest in acquire these skills are vital.
MOTIVATION/ DESIRE TO READ
We read to understand, learn and for enjoyment. While at early stages the mechanics of reading may take a lot of effort, as competent readers we read to understand.
BOOKS THAT ARE OF INTEREST TO THE CHILD.
Encourage children to choose, visually appealing books on topics of interest to hem
PLEASURABLE POSITIVE EXPERIENCE
Literacy games, Nessy / Youtube clips
FACTUAL
Children often enjoy reading about animals and nature.
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Phonological Awareness is an umbrella term which refers to many skills encompassed in the science of reading. It involves understanding the sound structure in spoken words. It is a hugely important base for reading skills. Numerous resources are available online to build Phonological Awareness.
PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Phonemic Awareness is one aspect of Phonological Awareness.
Before children can learn to read they need some prerequisite skills. They need to be able to recognise the sounds in spoken words, divide up or segment the sounds in words, blend these sounds together and manipulate these sounds. The term for this is Phonemic Awareness.
Steps to Phonemic Awareness involve:
1. Rhyme (bat, cat, rat) & Alliteration (bat, bag, bar)
2. Segmenting sentences into individual words
3. Segmenting and blending the syllables in words (croc-o- dile, mon-key)
4. Onset and Rime blending and segmentation (b-at, p-en)
5. Phoneme blending and segmentation (s-a-n-d is sand) and manipulation (sand without the s is and, and with a b at the start is band).
It is clear from this list that a lot of ground work is necessary before a child can start to read. The good news is that this work can be fun.
Nursery Rhymes and Rhyming games are brilliant for learning to rhyme, iSpy teaches alliteration.
Children learn to distinguish syllables by clapping them out.
Phoneme manipulation is playing with sounds and can be done using magnetic letters.
Brilliant, fun and interactive resources can be found online. See button below.
READING FLUENCY
Is the ability to recognise (or decode) words correctly and read them at an appropriate pace and with correct expression.
It is important because reading is about more than recognition- it is about understanding, enjoyment and assimilating information.
ACCURACY
Beginner Readers can expend a lot of their mental energy deciding what sound each letter makes (decoding and blending). This leaves less mental capacity for fluency and comprehension. Quickly and correctly decoding a word is hugely beneficial
Phonics
A systematic and explicit approach to phonics instruction is now widely used in schools and many parents will be familiar with programs such as Jolly Phonics.
Such programs teach the sound made by individual letter and groups of letters and the blending of these sounds to form words. These programs often incorporate rhymes, stories, visuals and characters to make the learning multisensory and fun.
ACCURACY ACTIVITIES
Hands on Learning
ACCURACY ACTIVITY
Reading pseudo (or nonsense words).
ACCURACY ACTIVITY
Dividing words into more manageable chunks
RESOURCES FOR PHONICS
Many engaging and informative videos can be found online, for example on YouTube to help children to learn various strategies but also to assist parents with new approaches to teaching reading.
Such as Nessy Learning and Mr. T's Phonics.
WHY IS FLUENCY IMPORTANT
The more automatically a child can decode a text the more mental energy they have available for understanding and assimilating what they have read.
Reading fluency is measured in words per minute. Ask the child to read a passage and record how many words they read correctly in one minute.
The numbers of word correctly is then divided
FLUENCY ACTIVITY
Modelled Reading
Children need to know what good readers do and how good reading sounds. Therefore it is very important to continue reading books and stories aloud to children even after they have started to read themselves.
Children can also listen to audio recordings of books or watch videos of people such as celebrities reading their favourite story.
FLUENCY ACTIVITY
Sight Word Games
As much as 75% of the text children read could be made up of sightwords. Sightwords continue to feature prominently in all levels of text (up to 50% of text). Sightwords may be referred to as Dolch, Fry, Tricky or High Frequency words. They are often given to children as flash cards. By becoming very familiar with these words and instantly recognising them in text children can dramatically improve their fluency.
However, the repetitive process of learning flashcards may not appeal to children. Therefore it is best transformed into a game either through the use of board games, card games or online games and apps.
ACTIVITY FOR FLUENCY
Repeated Reading
Reading the same piece of text a number of times helps to build fluency. Before a child reads a piece of text to an adult aloud they should read it to themselves. In order to encourage them to read the same text multiple times they could read it to a variety of audiences e.g. parents, grandparents, siblings or even the family pet.
Strategies such as echo reading (model or choral reading can be very useful in this regard.
COMPREHENSION
Reasons to read
We read to understand and be entertained.
Comprehension involves constructing meaning from text. It requires the reader to incorporate their prior knowledge on the subject which they are reading and come to understand the subject material.
The child’s ability to comprehend what they are reading is affected by their previous knowledge of the subject or genre, their store of vocabulary as well as how fluently and accurately they read. At early stages comprehension activities may be very literal but as children move through the reading levels they will need to bring into play skills such as inferring meaning, synthesizing information, determining what points are important and summarizing. In order to do this they will need to utilize strategies such as making predictions, creating visualisations and forming question.
Adults can help children by modelling what good readers do. Examples of this would be:
I wonder what this story is about? What do you think will happen next (predicting)
I read a book/saw a programme about x before (and providing information). Do you remember when we went to the _____ (zoo) and saw the ______ (cheetah)? (making connections)
Tell me what you learned about _________ (spiders) from the report? (summarizing)
I see _____ (mud on the floor) I wonder if_____ (the burglar came through the garden)? (inferring)
VOCABULARY
Reading to children from a young age is very important as it helps them to develop an interest in and positive disposition towards reading. But sharing a story with your child also has implications for their vocabulary. It exposes children to words which do not feature in their everyday lives and allows them to learn about everything from the moon and planets to sea creatures in the depth of the ocean and everything in between. Children’s stories help to stimulate their imagination, help them learn to name and understand the world around them and also the vocabulary to express their internal world and emotions.
Research shows a high correlation between the time spends reading and their vocabulary acquisition and results in reading assessments. Children who read for 21 minutes a day will be exposed to 1.8 million words per year, while there counterparts who only read for 4.6 minutes will only review 280,000 words (Anderson, Wilson and Fielding in Reading Research Quarterly Vol 23).
As children get older or if they are reluctant to read, they miss out on this rich lexicon, which can impact upon their comprehension and learning, unfortunately this often impacts upon their self confidence.
Written text introduces children to vocabulary that is less frequently used in spoken language, this is particularly the case for young children and also when children have learned to read. (The words used to help children to learn to read is usually those that are commonly used).
Therefore children who do not enjoy reading are also exposed to less novel vocabulary than their peers who are avid readers. A wide ranging vocabulary is necessary for comprehension. Therefore reluctance to read impacts on comprehension.
Vocabulary can be enhanced through building awareness of words e.g. checking the meanings of new ones, awareness of roots, prefixes, suffixes.
APPROACHES TO INCREASING EXPOSURE TO VOCAB THROUGH UTILISING VARIOUS TYPES OF READING
Audiobooks can assist children who find reading challenging, by providing them with access to books appropriate for their age and stage of education. Audiobooks allow them to focus on the words and content of the books rather than concentrating on word by word decoding. This can help them to develop knowledge and vocabulary appropriate to their stage of education and thereby increase their comprehension. Some reading programs offer both written books and audio-recordings, combining both and having children read along with the audio initially is useful for improving fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. It is important that the Audios are read by a human voice to allow correct fluency and intonation to be acquired. Naturally to be of benefit children will need to be engaged by and attentive to the audiobooks.
Shared reading (taking turns reading with a proficient reader) can also reduce the competing pressures on emerging readers.
Apps and technology which turn text into spoken word also have their place, particularly in allowing learners to hear the pronunciation of a small number of words or subject specific words.
TIERS OF VOCABULARY
Tier 1 are words that are commonly used everyday.
Tier 2 words are used across various subject areas and are central to comprehension, these words are more often found in written language than oral language.
Tier 3 less used or content specific words.
It is very important to enhance children’s store of Tier 2 words in order to improve their comprehension.
