How Do Children Learn To Read?

1. What are some ways I can help y child learn to read and become Proficient Readers? How Do Children Learn To Read?

2. Start Early: Brain Development

3. WHAT CAN I DO? MY CHILD IS HAVING A HARD TIME REMEMBERING INFORMATION • Pis for practice. • I is for Intensity • C is Cross-training • A is Adaptively • M is Motivation and Attention

4. Practice: Builds neuron pathways in your child’s brain by repeated exposer to a skill. • Intensity: Builds neuron support by intense focus • Cross-training: Brings together different skills such as language, fluency, and comprehension • Adaptively: Expose new skills just above your child's reading level. Not too easy, yet not too hard. • Motivation: Teach your child with high interesting activities to keep their attention. HOW WILL THIS HELP?

5. Children that have strong oral language skills: • Have increased vocabulary • Become better readers and writers • Are better listeners What you can do at home: Oral Language Skills • -Read to your child • -Talk to your child • -Sing with your child • -Give your child the opportunity to carry on child to adult conversations.

6. In the beginning, children learn vocabulary from their parents by listening to them talk, listening to stories and songs, and having child to adult conversations. As children grow they continue to develop vocabulary in these ways, but as the vocabulary becomes more difficult, they may need help to make vocabulary meaningful so it can be stored into memory. Vocabulary Development What you can do at home: -Continue to read, read, read -Keep in mind the capacity of the working memory and focus on only a few words at a time. -Have your child draw pictures to describe new vocabulary -Talk about new vocabulary and relate it to something that your child already knows about *(Schema) Read books incorporating vocabulary and themes of interest.

7. Phonological Awareness is a child’s ability to understand that sentences are made up of words and words are made up of syllables as well as individual sounds or phonemes (Sousa, 2005). What you can do at home: Phonological Awareness - Children can practice clapping the syllables in words. - Children can practice counting the number of words in a sentence by repeating a given sentence and jumping each time they say a new word. - Parents can show children picture cards and ask their child to tell them the beginning, middle, or ending sound of the picture.

8. Phonemic Awareness is similar to Phonological Awareness, but it focuses more on individual sounds or phonemes. This is the skill that children develop that helps them realize that bat and ball both have the same beginning sound or cat and hat rhyme because they both end with the –at sound. What you can do at home: Phonemic Awareness - Read nursery rhymes and rhyming books to your child. - Get a variety of pictures that rhyme and put them on 3 by 5 cards. Make sure that you have at least 10 different sets of rhyming pictures. Then have your child try to find the pictures that go together. - Sing *Raffi’s Willoughby Wallaby song using family members names. As they start to understand the song switch from Willoughby, Wallaby to Silloughby Sallaby and so on until you have practiced many different letter sounds.

9. Phonemes are the sounds of the letters while graphemes are the symbols that represent the sounds, like the letters of the alphabet. In order to learn how to read, children need to learn to recognize these letters and understand the sounds that they represent. The English language is confusing and complicated because there are 44 phonemes with over 1,100 ways to spell these sounds (Sousa, 2005). What you can do at home: Phonemes to Graphemes • -Sing the song “I Like to Eat Pepperoni Pizza” (Dr. Jean’s Silly • Songs, 2007). It is a fun way to show children how you can • change a word just by changing one sound. -Play Spill a Word * • -Play the game “Making Big Words” (Cunningham, 2001). **

10. “The alphabetic principle describe the understanding that spoken words are made up of phonemes and that the phonemes are represented in written text as letters” (Sousa, 2005, p. 36). When children understand that letters represent sounds and we can put them together to read and write words, a whole world of learning will be opened up to them. If children have heard these sounds in spoken language in a variety of situations it will be much easier for them to transfer this knowledge to reading and writing. What you can do at home: Alphabetic Principle Go Fish! -Play ABC Go Fish* -Pick a letter of the alphabet (B for example), then cut out pictures in magazines of all of the things you can think of that start with the letter B and make a collage. • -Play I Spy (Find something in the room like the window and say, “I spy • something that starts with a w (say the letter and the sound as you hold • up a card with the letter on it). When someone guesses the correct • object , then someone can spy something that starts with a different • letter).

11. In order to decode words, children need to know the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that they represent. Decoding is when a student reads each individual sound in a word and blends them together to read the word. What you can do at home: Decoding/ Phonics -Play a guess my word game. Using CVC words * Uncover each letter one at a time and let your child say the letter sounds until they have all 3 sounds so they can blend them together. -Read with your child and help them practice sounding out unknown words. You can also pretend that you are stuck on reading certain words and ask your child to help you sound it out. This will help your child learn how to use the decoding strategy when he starts to read on his own. -Take magnet letters and create words by moving letters around and then blending the sounds together. Allow inventive spelling. This builds confidence, and letter sound correspondence. Read decodable text with letter sound combinations introduced.

12. Morphemes are the smallest word parts that can change the word’s meaning, like ing, s, and ed (Sousa, 2005). Prefixes and Suffixes are morphemes. What you can do at home: Morphemes & Morphology -Play a game making nonsense words by adding ing and ed to a variety of words. Talk about whether or not you made a real or a pretend word. -Go through magazines and find 2 to 3 words that have smaller word parts in them. Glue these words to a piece of paper then write a sentence and draw a picture using each of the words you found. -Using a newspaper play a word hunt game and highlight as many words as you can find in 3 minutes that have word parts like ing, ed, s, re, tion, un, etc.

13. If children develop good oral comprehension skills through listening to their parents talk, sing, and read stories, then they will be more likely to have good reading comprehension skills as well. Oral & Reading Comprehension What you can do at home: -Have a purpose for reading. Read to your child and ask questions about the stories (Who, What, When, Why, and How ?’s) -Talk to your children and allow them to carry on conversations with you in their own words. -Help your child to learn new vocabulary by playing Balderdash * Help your child form mental images and then illustrate parts of the book.

14. Syntax is the structure or word order of a sentence. In simple sentences there is only one meaning, but as sentences become more complex the structure of the sentence helps the reader understand the meaning. What you can do at home: Syntax -Take a sentence and mix up the order of the words. Have your child read the sentence and draw a picture of it. Mix the words up again and repeat the process. Compare the two sentences and pictures to see how they are different (example The hat is on the cat. The cat is on the hat.) -Take a sentence out of your favorite story. Write the words on a strip of paper and cut them out. Then take the words and see if there is another way to put your words together to make a sentence. Illustrate the new meaning of your sentence. -Read stories and listen to songs to expose your child to the structure of sentences.

15. Immediate Memory is a place we put information briefly until our brain figures out what to do with it. Working memory can hold some information for a little bit of time until we figure out a way to store what we have learned in long-term memory. Memory is an important part of learning to read. There are many skills that need to be stored to memory in order for us to become successful readers. What you can do at home: Memory -Play memory games with your child, like concentration to help build your child’s memory skills. -Build your child’s background knowledge by reading books, communicating, and exploring the world around you. -Create songs and draw pictures about things that are important to remember.

16. How Does the Working Memory “ Work ? ”

17. HOW CAN I HELP MY CHILD RETAIN INFORMATION IN HIS/ HER LONG TERM MEMORY?

18. Our schema helps us organize and understand information. What you can do at home: Schema -Make lists to help you organize your thoughts. -Read about different topics and talk about how these topics relate to similar topics that you already know about. -Look at pictures before reading the text to get your mind thinking about words that relate to the pictures in the story.

19. Context clues help the reader make sense of new words. These clues can be found in the text before and after the word that is new. What you can do at home: Context Clues -Read together and discuss words that your child does not know. Are there any clues in the story that can tell you what the word means? -Read sentences from different stories, but leave one word out. See if your child can guess what word might be missing after reading all of the other words. -Pull a random word out of the dictionary and write a sentence using it. See if your child can figure out what your word means. Then have your child find a word and write a sentence to see if you can figure out what his word means.

20. Knowing sight words and other vocabulary will help a reader to develop fluency when they are reading. What you can do at home: Word Recognition -Practice sight words by playing sight word go fish. -Read to and with your child by pointing to each word. -Read and talk to your child to help develop greater vocabulary skills.

21. Fluency is what keeps the reader going. When a reader can read a text without sounding out every word or struggling through the text, there will be better reading comprehension. Knowing sight words and having good vocabulary skills will help a reader to develop better fluency. What you can do at home: Fluency I can read! -Practice reading the same text over and over. This may seem boring to you, but to a beginning reader it is exciting because they feel more and more successful every time they read it. -Take a picture walk and talk about the pictures before you read. This helps your child build some of the vocabulary that they might need to read the text. -Have conversations with your child. When children can fluently carry on oral conversations, they become better readers.

22. When children become more skilled in their reading abilities they are able to self-correct or fix their mistakes as they are reading. A child might read “I see a door.” and quickly correct it saying “I see a dog.” What you can do at home: Self Correcting Skills -When you read aloud to your child occasionally make a mistake, fix it, go back and reread it again. As you model this behavior, your child sees that it is alright to make mistakes and fix them instead of skipping over it. -Once in awhile you can ask your child “Does that make sense?” when they read a word incorrectly. You will not want to do this all of the time with beginning readers because they will get frustrated, but once in awhile can be helpful.

23. Chard, D. J. and Dickson, S. V. (1999). Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines. LD Online. May 29, 2012 from http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/ Gay, D. (n.d.). How to Communicate With Your Baby. Ivillage. May 28, 2012 from http://www.ivillage.co.uk/how-communicate-your-baby/82048 Ideal Curriculum. (2009). Oral Language Development, the Foundation of Literacy. May 28, 2012 from http://www.idealcurriculum.com/oral-language-development.html Kididdles. Willoughby Wallaby Song. May 28, 2012 from http://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/w120.html Nemours. Reading Books to Babies. May 28, 2012 from http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/learning/reading_babies.html Sousa, D. A. (2005). How the Brain Learns to Read. California: Corwin Press. Bibliography