Believe it or not, if your 2 year old is ‘reading’ a book upside down, or dancing around a book while they ‘read,’ or asking you to read the same story for the 27th time, you are right on track. This is early literacy.
By the end of this article, you are going to know and recognize what early literacy skills your child is developing.
Let’s dive in.
Our brains are wired for speaking, not reading. Learning to read is not a natural process like learning to speak, but oral language is the foundation for reading.
The fact that oral language is the foundation for reading is behind what early literacy researchers call the “million word gap.” The language foundation gap between children who are read to a lot versus a little or not at all. Literary foundations begin when babies are read to, and the lack or presence of that foundation impacts them greatly by the age of 4, in PreK.
Learning to read is really a combination of a lot of foundational skills and knowledge working together. There are 4 things to consider:
- A child must learn that the special shapes printed in black in their picture books are letters not part of the illustration, which, when read left to right, make the words of a story. This is print awareness.
- A child needs to know the sounds of a language. English has 44 sounds. Happily, our brains are wired to learn this. This is phonological awareness.
- A child must memorize which letters, and combinations of letters, represent which sounds, and then blend those small groups of sounds into pronouncing syllables. This is phonics.
- Finally, children must put this knowledge and skill to use in deciphering multisyllabic words with immediacy, without thinking, over and over and over again. This is fluency.
A Note About Hyperlexia
Kids who learn to read merely by being read to are hyperlexic, meaning, they are at least a bit gifted in this area. For us non-gifted kiddos, however, being read to builds print awareness, vocabulary, motivation, and a love for reading, but we don’t absorb all the decoding skills we need to become fluent readers. We have to be taught.
Inventory of Knowledge and Ability to Begin Reading
Step 1: Know that letters make words (Print Awareness)
How do you encourage print awareness? Point to the words as you read to your child.
“Knowing letters” is an interesting concept. (Fun Fact: Writing was invented around 4 times in human history. A phonetic alphabet was only invented twice.) Realise that to a baby being read board books, or chewing on board books, everything on the page is the same: the ball, the puppy, the word ‘ball’ and the word ‘puppy,’ are simply shapes and colors on the page.
A baby/toddler must learn that the letters and words on the page are not the same as the illustration. Babies and toddlers must learn that those black squiggly things are what is being read to them and that they go in a particular order: left to right and top to bottom, not just willy nilly.
Everything on a flat page of a story book is a shape or thing of sorts, but the letters on the page and the stuff in the illustrations on the page are not the same thing, and a 1, 2, 3 year old is learning this when you read them board books and point to words while you read.
Step 2: Know the sounds in our language (Phonemic Awareness)
Phonemic awareness is awareness of the sounds that make up your language. It is all about hearing a language and its sounds. For example, the sound Ü, roughly the sound ‘ew’, doesn’t exist in American English. So a baby listening to American English is not going to learn that sound.
English has around 45ish sounds, fewer than German which has 56ish, more than French which has 36ish. In English, including consonant digraphs, like th and sh, there are 25 consonant sounds. As for vowel sounds, single and digraphs, there are around 20.
In order to read, our brains have to do a lot with phonemic awareness. So how can you build phonemic awareness? Children practice this through rhyming, alliteration, clapping out words by syllable, and sound blending activities. (For example, I say /d/ /aw/ /g/ and ask a child what word I just said, the child says dog.)
Step 3: Phonics and word recognition
Phonics is pronouncing syllables or monosyllabic words, and it requires print awareness and phonemic awareness. A child has to work with a lot of memorized knowledge to practice phonics. Let’s take inventory of exactly what a child must have memorized and learned to practice phonics:
- Memorize 52 letter shapes: 26 upper case letters and their matching 26 lower case.
- Memorize all of the sounds (and names of letters) that go with those letters.
- Memorize vowel digraphs, like ‘ai’ or ‘oa’ and their sounds. There are 15-20 of these in total.
- Memorize consonant digraph sounds like sh, ch, th, wh, ng, ck.
With all of this knowledge, now our child is ready to apply it by pronouncing simple single syllable words and single syllable non-sense words: cat, hat, dog, sun, vap, tob, zog, blug…
Non-sense words are critical in phonics because they ensure that our kiddo is not memorizing words, but is actually reading them. We want our little reader actually sounding out words, not memorizing them or guessing after a letter or two.
This step is also the very visible part of learning to read. It is the sounding out phase. A kiddo knows that sounds for ‘B’ ‘oa’ and ‘t’ are /b/ ō t respectively, but now they have to blend those sounds together and recognize them as the word boat.
Word recognition means that when a child sees the letters s-u-n together, knows that the sounds are /s/ /uh/ /n/, they recognize this as the word ‘sun.’ Vocabulary development becomes very important.
Step 4: Fluency: Deciphering multisyllabic words with immediacy, without thinking, over and over and over again.
You are reading this article fluently. You are not sounding out anything. Your brain is on autopilot, taking in word after word after word, using so little brain power that your brain is easily able to put those words together into ideas. You are thinking about the ideas in the writing, not the words. Perfect grade-level fluency by the end of 2nd grade is absolutely critical.
Teaching students to read ends in the 2nd grade. A child must have completely mastered reading by the end of 2nd grade. There is no more how to read instructions. Only comprehension and vocabulary development remain.
For a student who has not completely mastered reading, starting the 3rd grade is like failing algebra and being pushed along to calculus with whatever tidbits of algebra knowledge you managed to pick up. As a matter of fact, reading instruction in the 2nd grade shifts to decoding multisyllabic words, so being behind with learning to read quickly snowballs, and not in a good way.
By the end of 2nd grade, children must be done learning to read and they must be ready to read to learn. Now, it’s all about comprehension and vocabulary development.
Bonus: Comprehension
Comprehension and vocabulary building is the real objective of reading, and your brain can only step over to comprehension when you are reading fluently, or being read to.
When they are read to, children begin to understand narrative structures: that stories have characters, that characters have problems, learn things, and resolve their problems. They also learn that reading and being read to is a fun activity.
Children who are read to also grow their vocabularies. Learning vocabulary of things you encounter everyday, like breakfast, milk, and plates, is one thing, but unless you have narwhales in your bathtub, how else is your child going to learn what a narwhale is if you don’t read the board book What is a Narwhale? The Pout Pout Fish will teach your child the words out, grimace, dreary, weary, cheer, and smile. Good Night Moon teaches: moon, stars, cow, mice, comb, brush, bowl, mittens, house, mouse. Linguists say that we must be exposed to a word at least 14 times before we incorporate it into our receptive vocabulary, not even our working vocabulary.
That is early literacy. All you have to do to encourage early literacy skills is read to them more than one book a day, point to the words as you read, play with rhymes and alliteration, and clap out syllables.
So, when your child is asking you to read Good Night Moon for the 27th time, this means that they love when you read to them and this means that they love the story: they know the words, it is familiar. Children are surrounded by unfamiliar things and can find very familiar books comforting! When they are dancing around The Pout Pout Fish on the floor, acting it out, and ‘reading’ it upside down, well, this also just means that they love reading.