Nurturing a developing reader and writer

If I am my child’s first teacher, what should I know to begin fulfilling this role?

During the first five years of life you have the awesome responsibility of nurturing a developing reader and writer ready to begin school with a love for learning. Your child’s teachers have the tools and strategies to develop specific skills in a logical progression for optimal development over time. However, if the prerequisites for learning those new skills in a timely fashion aren’t in place, the teacher’s task will be monumental to help your child “catch up.” Remember, the statistics… your child is in school for 35 hours per week (25 of those hours being instructional time where your child isn’t the only one in the class). Your child is in the home environment 133 hours per week (or a daycare setting if you have after school care). I have listed some language skills that need to be introduced and practiced in the home environment before entering school and while in the early grades (kindergarten & first).

Understand basic skills:
• recognize the printed word in the environment
• have knowledge of the alphabet
• have knowledge of the relationship of letters to sounds at the beginning and ending of words

It is not enough for children to simply be able to “sing” the alphabet when entering school today. They need to have had some experience with seeing, feeling and saying letters in isolation to begin to grasp other literacy concepts relative to learning to read and write fluently. It is important that he is able to use the letters to write his name. He may not be able to name all 26 letters but he should have experience with both the uppercase and lowercase letters through magnets, alphabet soup/cereal, etc…

Use a broad vocabulary which includes:
• knowing the meaning of single words that represent objects and groups of objects, actions, and qualities of space and time; example, he would know that an apple – has seeds, has a stem, is a fruit, grows on a tree and can be green, yellow or red.

Most young children when asked what an apple is would say, “you eat it.” This response is just not enough to be considered “ready” to read and comprehend when entering school. Teachers would consider this response below basic for a kindergartener. If you don’t understand what a word means when you are reading the word, how will you be able to comprehend it while in context of a story? Vocabulary is one of the weakest abilities of young children in our society today. Choose a word or more a day and share facts about that word. Talk about how that word relates to your child’s life to force the new knowledge into the long-term memory department of the brain.

To be continued tomorrow…