The ABCs of Reading With Your Child
A. Aloud
Read aloud 20 minutes a day with your child. From birth to age five, this enjoyable activity provides 600 hours of essential pre-literacy preparation before entering school. Once in school, it’s essential to continue the read-aloud habit throughout the elementary school years.
B. Basic Knowledge Before Entering Kindergarten
At age five your child may:
- listen to a book and retell the beginning, middle and end
- know 12-15 upper case letters (A, B, C)
- know 12-15 lower case letters (a, b, c)
- know sounds of 12-15 letters
- recite 6-10 nursery rhymes
- know some print concepts (e.g., reading moves left to right, meaning comes from words, pictures help meaning)
- speak in complete sentences
- print first name using upper and lower case letters.
Please visit the website of premier program Ready! for Kindergarten™ for further information on how you as a parent can take an active role in your child’s kindergarten readiness.
C. Conversations
Have frequent conversations with your child. Reading is about language. Immerse your child in it. Talk often. Listen, and ask your child questions that require more than a one or two word response.
Stimulating Brain Development
Reading with your child at home from birth literally wires brain cells together in networks that later facilitate independent reading. Brain research shows that those linked brain cells enable a child to:
- detect the different sounds in words (phonemic awareness)
- recognize letters and develop strategies to figure out new words (decoding)
- develop real-world understanding of what the words refer to (create contexts for understanding meaning)
- build an oral and listening vocabulary (approximately 5,000 words by kindergarten).
Article Provided by
The Children’s Reading Foundation