Learn to read pre school

The Pre-K Years: Getting Ready to Read and Write

Creating literacy-rich environments

There’s no doubt that building skills in a few areas during the preschool years can make a huge difference when a child enters school. Browse through to learn more about helping preschool children learn about language, letters, sounds, and how print works. Finally, learn how to choose and read children’s books that will help you enjoy reading together for years to come.

Learn about each of these key areas

Letters and the alphabetic principle

The best predictor of success in reading is a child’s familiarity with the the alphabet. This includes knowing a letter’s name, shape, and sound. A child who can name the letters and their sounds accurately and quickly have an easier time learning how to read. Let’s watch some activities that help children learn their ABC’s.

The Importance of the Alphabetic Principle

Renowned reading researcher Dr. Louisa Moats explains the need for understanding the alphabetic principle.

The Building Blocks of Reading

In Baltimore, a pre-kindergarten program called Children’s Literacy Initiative helps at-risk children meet the school’s high expectations.

Teaching the Alphabetic Principle

In Houston, the teacher of an advanced kindergarten class connects letters and sounds in a systematic and explicit way.

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Sounds in speech

Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers can learn to have fun with sounds! Figuring out words that rhyme, coming up with words that share a beginning sound, and saying silly words all help build a child’s phonological awareness; that is, the ability to notice, think about, and play with sounds in words. These skills will be used every time your child reads and writes!

Fun with Phonemes

One family in Raleigh, North Carolina, shows how playing word and rhyming games puts their child on the road to reading success.

Babies Tune in to Speech Sounds

At a baby speech lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, psychologist Janet Werker studies how babies develop skills that distinguish speech sounds of their native language.

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Oral language and vocabulary

Unlike reading, babies and young children are wired to learn how to speak. From birth to 5 years old, children learn to communicate and acquire a sophisticated vocabulary. This foundation of spoken language forms the bedrock that supports their future reading and writing skills. Let’s learn some ways to support children’s budding language skills and explore some activities for the early childhood classroom.

Having fun with words

This brief Parenting Minute video from WNET talks about how parents and caregivers can help build their children’s language skills through storytelling, talking, singing, playing rhyming games, as well as by pointing out and discussing things throughout the day. (Video also available in Spanish, Bengali, and Chinese)

Encouraging Young Storytellers

Two- and three-year-olds benefit from a project based in Washington, D.C., called STORIES, which is built on the premise that when adults respond to a toddler's efforts to communicate, they increase conversational skills, boost vocabulary, and propel toddlers towards literacy.

Exposing Pre-K Children to Big Words

In this clip from our webinar, Babbling to Books, early literacy expert Dr. Sharon Ramey talks about the importance of exposing very young children to rich language and big words.

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Print awareness

Print awareness is understanding that print is organized in a particular way — for example, knowing that print is read from left to right and top to bottom. It is also knowing that print communicates meaning. Watching your child scribble and ask you to “read” it back. Sharing a book together as you point out the title and pictures versus the print. Activities that adults may take for granted, such as finding letters, words, and spaces in books. These are all examples of concepts of print.

Parents can support print awareness by pointing to words as you read and stopping a few times during the story to ask questions, make a comment, or to point to something in the text you want your child to notice. Justice and Ezell (2004) call this strategy print referencing and suggest adults stop and make 3-5 verbal or nonverbal references to the print during read alouds. Understanding how print works puts children on the path to learning to read and write.

Becoming Aware of Print

Mira is two-and-a-half years old. Watch how Mira's parents help her become aware of print.

Concepts of print and letter recognition assessments

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Reading together

Sharing books with your child can be among the most special moments of the day. These moments with books teach your child many reading readiness skills. Our resources in this section describe the why's and how's of reading with even the youngest child.

House Calls for Literacy

Watch as an early literacy educator visits a family at home to demonstrate and support interactive readalouds.

Bringing Up Baby

Parents are a child’s first teachers and those early years are key to creating a strong foundation for later reading. The Reach Out and Read program works with pediatricians across the country to help parents and kids start off on the right foot.

Reading as Dialogue

In a Long Island Head Start classroom, children who are at risk for reading failure boost their reading skills using a technique called "dialogic reading."

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Writing

Children, even our youngest learners, enjoy putting crayon to paper. What often starts as scribbling ends up being important clues to a child’s understanding that print carries meaning. Four-year olds often enjoy “writing” their name and other special words like Mom, Dad, love, and you. Helping your child develop writing readiness skills includes making the most out of everyday writing and providing lots of opportunity to practice!

First Marks

Writing expert Dr. Jane Hansen describes how powerful it is for very young children to realize that they can communicate through oral language — and by making "marks" on a piece of paper.

Emergent Writing

Let’s watch classroom teachers demonstrate effective writing instruction for young children in this video by the Northeast Florida Educational Consortium.

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Children’s Books to Read Aloud

Developmental milestones

Find out what language accomplishments are typical for most children from birth to age three. If you have questions or concerns about your child's progress, talk with your child's doctor, teacher, or a speech and language therapist. For children with any kind of disability or learning problem, the sooner they can get the special help they need, the easier it will be for them to learn.

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If You Have Concerns

High-quality preschool programs

Strong preschool programs are lively places — there’s lots of conversation, active play, interactive read alouds, adults listening to and responding to the kids, all with full attention to each child’s social and emotional needs. A high-quality pre-k curriculum sets goals specific to pre-k and uses learning and developmental standards that are research-based, age-appropriate, and aligned with your state’s K-12 standards. And families are valued — high-quality programs respect and support each family’s home language and at-home teaching efforts.

Reading Maestros

Master teacher Dr. Rebecca Palacios runs a dual-language immersion preschool in Corpus Christi, Texas. While teaching her kids, she also mentors teachers-in-training on how to provide top-notch teaching in a preschool environment.

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Teaching preschoolers to read - The Measured Mom

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We’re in the golden years of parenting.

Right now, in 2021, our family is between diapers and dating. And I love it.

Things are still wild and crazy (and LOUD), but that’s to be expected with six kids ages 5-13.

I admit that I don’t miss the Exhausted Years … the years I had a preschooler, baby, and toddler all at once.

I can’t count how many times I pushed a shopping cart with a baby seat in the cart, a toddler in the front, and preschoolers pulling on my coat.

Many shoppers couldn’t resist remarking, “You’ve got your hands full.”

These days, even though my eye bags are worsening, my wrinkles are deepening, and my hair is graying, I am getting sleep.

(And I am SO thankful for it!)

But you know what I do miss about those early years?

Teaching my kids to read.

Thankfully, I have one preschooler left. He’s five years old, and he’ll start kindergarten in the fall. I’ve been teaching him to read for a few months, and it’s been So. Much. Fun.

But is this necessary? SHOULD you teach your preschooler to read?

It depends.

You shouldn’t teach your child to sound out words until s/he has important foundational skills.

Then, and only then, should you move on to decoding words and reading decodable text.

READ TO YOUR CHILD AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN

While reading to kids is not teaching reading, and does not guarantee that your child will be able to read successfully, it does build language comprehension … and this is a key piece of the reading puzzle. Browse all our book lists here.

TALK ABOUT BOOKS AS YOU READ ALOUD

As you read aloud to your child, ask thoughtful questions and have a discussion. This post about interactive read alouds will show you what kinds of questions to ask.

TEACH YOUR CHILD THE ALPHABET

Some people think you should start with letter sounds before teaching letter names, but I disagree … although there’s nothing wrong with teaching both at once if your child is up for it. Should you do letter of the week? Maybe. Teach multiple letters each week if your child can remember them.

TEACH LETTER SOUNDS

Since I taught my kids their alphabet when they were two or three years old, most of them weren’t ready to learn sounds that early. So I taught letter sounds after they knew their letters. Here is my favorite printable for teaching letter sounds.

TEACH RHYMING, CONCEPT OF WORD, AND SYLLABLES

These are all elements of phonological awareness, which basically means that kids can play with sounds in words. Search my website for free resources, or buy these packs that have everything you need at your fingertips.

• Use my Nursery Rhyme concepts of print packs to teach the concept of word.
• Use my Rhyming Activities pack to build this important skill.
• Use my Syllable Activities pack to help kids count and identify syllables in words.

SPEND A LONG-ISH TIME TEACHING PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Phonemic awareness is the ability to play with sounds in words. In recent months I’ve done a lot of study on this, and I’ve learned that this really is key in helping kids become proficient readers. The good news is that it’s easy to teach, and it only takes a few minutes a day. But you need to do this for some time, and it should continue even after you start teaching reading.

It helps to have a curriculum that you can follow. If you have a budget for it, consider purchasing Heggerty’s daily curriculum for preschool. Or download and print the free lessons from Reading Done Right. Looking for a more play-based approach? Get Marilyn Adams’ Phonemic Awareness curriculum.

ASSESS YOUR CHILD’S PHONOLOGICAL/PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Give your child a phonological awareness assessment to see if you should move on to teaching reading. I have a free assessment here. If you give the assessment and aren’t sure what your next steps should be, contact me via the Contact tab on the website. I’m happy to help!

TEACH BLENDING USING SUCCESSIVE BLENDING

Ready to read? Awesome! It’s time to get started with preschool phonics activities.

I find it helpful to start with successive blending (sometimes called cumulative blending). The above activity worked wonders for my youngest two kids. You can get the free printable (and how to use it) in this post.

PLAY CVC READING GAMES

As your learner is catching on to sounding out words, play lots of CVC word games. CVC stands for consonant-vowel-consonant. I have found that diving right in with decodable texts in preschool can be overwhelming. Consider start with games to build confidence.

• Our free matching games are great for beginners.
• Kids also enjoy our four-in-a-row reading games.
• Our word slider cards are another great tool.
• If phonemic awareness is solid, but sounding out words is still tough, consider using word families to start. I like our word building cards.

TEACH A HANDFUL OF BASIC SIGHT WORDS

How are things going? Is your learner getting better at those CVC words? It’s not necessary (or even helpful) to teach loads of sight words to preschoolers. However, I recommend introducing just a few sight words in preschool so that your child can be successful with quality decodable texts. I recommend teaching these words in a multisensory way using my free sight word lessons and books.

Here are some good words to start with: a, I, see, the, is

START HAVING YOUR CHILD READ DECODABLE BOOKS

“Decodable” means something different to every reader, because it means that the child has been taught the phonics patterns for most of the words.

In the past I’ve always resisted decodable books and recommended leveled readers instead. However, after a lot of study I realize that leveled books for our earliest readers are not a good choice. This is because they contain many words students could not read in isolation, so they must use context or pictures to figure out the words. In order for them to cement the words into their brains for future retrieval, it’s important that our students connect the sounds to the letters – in other words, sound them out.

This feels like slooooow going at first, when kids have to sound out every letter, but if they have a strong phonemic awareness foundation they will get it.

There are many decodable books to choose from. When starting with brand-new readers, I recommend books that move at a slow pace and have a variety of books for each level. Here are some of my favorites for very beginning readers:

• Reading for All Learners: I See Sam books
• The Alphabet Series books
• Half-Pint Readers: These are very affordable. The stories are cute and simple, but they still have a plot. Highly recommended!
• Power Readers: These are very inexpensive because they are meant to be written in. Not as engaging as some of the other books, but good to have.

TEACH OTHER PHONICS PATTERNS AND MOVE ON TO MORE CHALLENGING BOOKS

It may be best to keep going with CVC words until kindergarten. Developing automaticity with these words (so that your child can read each word without sounding them out letter by letter) is a wonderful goal, but it can take some time.

However, if your child is breezing through your CVC decodable books and is ready for the next step, teach beginning blends and digraphs. Then move on to CVCE words.

REMEMBER TO KEEP READING ALOUD TO YOUR CHILD

Sometimes, when we’re teaching our kids to read, we forget to set ample time to read to them and discuss the books. Since early books aren’t very “deep,” we need to use other literature to build vocabulary and comprehension.

I hope this post was helpful! Feel free to leave a comment below or send my team a message via the Contact tab if you need more support.

Free Reading Printables for Pre-K-3rd Grade

Join our email list and get this sample pack of time-saving resources from our membership site! You'll get phonemic awareness, phonics, and reading comprehension resources ... all free!

Is it necessary to teach a child to read before school? Of course you do.

It is during the preschool period that any normally developing child begins to show interest in letters (“What letter is this?”) And in the process of reading and writing (“What is written here?” “What are you writing?”) And the task of parents is to support and satisfy this interest.

Another question, how to do it? There are many techniques - Nikolai Zaitsev's cubes, Glen Doman's cards, Vyacheslav Voskobovich's "Teremki" and "Skladushki", Evgeny Chaplygin's dynamic cubes, Pavel Tyulenev's MIRR development system, etc. All these techniques are described in detail and are available for study.

The traditional method of teaching was and remains the sound-letter method (or, as it is also called, the sound method), in which we see letters, correlate them with sounds and put them into syllables, and then into words. According to this method, the child, as you understand, first needs to learn the letters (not necessarily all), and then learn to read them in syllables and words.

Learning letters and sounds

By the age of 2-4, children begin to be interested in letters. Letters for a child are abstract, unrelated icons. And so that the child can remember them, he must be able to play with them, feel them, hear and see them. Therefore, acquaintance with letters should take place in an involuntary form: we color the letters, connect them point by point, write with chalk on the pavement, with a stick on the sand; we sculpt letters from plasticine, lay out from buttons, lace or counting sticks; we turn it from wire, we find it on a magnetic board; circle on stencils; remember the alphabet, recognize the capital letters in books; showing letters on street signs, etc.

Hang letters all over your apartment! Periodically ask the child to find a particular letter or, conversely, name the letter you are showing.

In this unconscious way, by the age of four or five, most children already know the 10-15 most commonly used letters (A, O, U, I, N, M, G, P, V, D, T, R, etc.). Only you should not call the letters [em] or [be], but the sounds [m], [b]. Those. when we say the letter "M" or "B", we still mean the sound [m] or [b]. This is due to the fact that later it will be difficult for the child to understand how the word “house” is obtained from the sounds [de] [o] [em].

Few of the parents, teaching their child to read, explain to him how letters (this is what we write and see) differ from sounds (what we pronounce and hear), how to recognize vowels (“sing”) and consonants what consonants are (hard, soft, voiced, deaf), how many sounds are in a word, and how many letters, etc. And yet, not knowing all these concepts, children begin to read! This means that the study of vowels and consonants has nothing to do with reading. Therefore, you should not “load” children with sound-letter analysis. They have yet to face this in first grade. However, it is necessary to learn to distinguish the sequence of sounds in words. Otherwise, the child will not be able to understand the structure of the word and will have difficulty writing words.

Start reading

By the age of 5, most children begin to show an interest in reading, such as trying to read store signs or pretending to read a book. In this case, you can try to start teaching your child to read. But be careful: learning to read is a rather repetitive and monotonous activity, and children often lose interest in it. Therefore, everything should happen in the game. To help the parent and child, it is advisable to choose a suitable, interesting, well-written, training manual.

Choosing a book

It's not easy to choose among the many primers, ABCs, workbooks, books with stickers, board games that are designed to teach your child to read, exactly what you and your child need!

When choosing a manual, pay attention to the following criteria:

- Tasks in the manual should be arranged according to the principle “from simple to complex”: first reading syllables, short words, long words and finally sentences.

- Presentation of material - in a playful way: bright and emotionally rich. But at the same time, there is “something to read” - after all, systematic training is needed to improve reading skills.

- The material in the manual should contribute to the expansion of vocabulary, the development of cognitive processes (attention, perception, thinking, memory, imagination), speech.

- Illustrations should be done in a calm color scheme, not distracting from reading and not suggesting the names of words. For this purpose, the words can be placed at the top of the page, and all subject pictures for these words - at the bottom.

- The font must be large, gradually decreasing; In the early stages, words are divided into syllables.

Content of the lesson

The lesson should not only consist of reading syllables, words or sentences. It is necessary to change the types of activities: they read, wrote letters or words, painted over something, scribbled, completed the task for the development of mental operations (analysis, synthesis, classification, comparison, generalization), moved, etc.

Lesson time

Choose the right time to study. The child should be in a good mood and not tired. Remember, reading with a child of 4-5 years old should be done no more than 5 minutes, 5-6 years old - 10 minutes, 6-7 years old - 15 minutes. As soon as you notice that the child is distracted, stop the activity, even if the allotted time has not yet passed.

Support the child

It is important for the child to pay attention to his activities. He will study with great pleasure if you take a direct part in his studies and rejoice in his success. At the end of the lesson, be sure to praise the child for his “work”, mark achievements. Don't be afraid to praise! Praise and praise.

Let's improve reading skills

It happens that a child learns to read syllables, but cannot combine them into words. Be patient: it means that the child is still mentally “not ready”, everything has its time. It is also helpful to take one-day breaks in classes, and after 3-4 weeks even a week-long break! This will help you understand the material better. And you will see that after the rest the child will begin to read much better.

Educate the reader

Be sure to read poems, fairy tales, stories to your child every day. Everyday reading introduces the child to books, shows how interesting and useful it is to be able to read.

And finally, the most important thing: what is the right way to start teaching a child to read?

Reading is taught according to the following scenario “From syllables to texts”:

Reading syllables with the first vowel A, O, U, Y, E, I (reverse syllables) (AG, AB, etc. ). The child needs to name the letters in the syllable in the order "A, M" - "AM". To do this, the child pulls the first letter until he can attach the second letter to it: AAAAAAAAAAM.

At first, the second letter in syllables should be fixed: AS, OS, US. The child will already be ready for the fact that the second letter is always C. Next, we complicate the exercises: we make the first letter in the syllables of a fixed , for example: AB, AB, AN.