Education: Literacy

 Benefits of Reading Aloud to Children

Every time you read aloud to students, you are modeling good reading skills. From fluency to voice inflection, it is important for students to hear good reading so that they can imitate it in their own reading. Specifically, reading aloud to students: Provides motivation for reading and learning. By listening to a strong reader model the enjoyment of reading, students will become more motivated for their own reading and learning. Helps build background knowledge. One of the things that stru...

 Six Components of Teaching Reading

Component 1: Reading Aloud Reading aloud can be done as a full class activity, in small groups, or on a one-to-one basis. It involves an adult reading a piece of text or a book out loud to students. However it is done, it is a teacher-directed activity that requires student participation, as Debra Morrison indicates in Read Aloud and Movement, an ASCD video-based professional development program. Debra reads a book to her students about a cricket who wants to be a butterfly. As she reads, sh...

 Tips for Parents to Encourage Reading

Read to your child. Try to read to your child every day. Read from a wide variety of materials and books. Encourage writing. Encourage your child to scribble and pretend write if they are young. Encourage older children to write stories and letters and share them with the family. Have writing materials readily available. Have reading material at home. Have a wide variety of books, children's magazines, and newspapers available for children to read or look at. Get your child a libr...

 227 cognitive verbs organized into 24 categories of seman...

Add to: combine, deepen, improve, incorporate, integrate, introduceArrange: arrange, list, organize, sortBig picture: comprehend, contextualize, orient, understandCollaborate: collaborate, contribute, engage, interact, participate, shareCompare: associate, categorize, classify, compare, connect, contrast, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, link, match, relateCreate: accomplish, achieve, build, compose, construct, create, develop, draft, form, generate, initiate, produce, publish, recor...

 Phoneme Exercises

Start simple, recommends Karen Tankersley in her ASCD book The Threads of Reading: Strategies for Literacy Development (2003): Introduce beginning sounds first. Add medial and final sounds after the child has mastered the beginning sounds. Select one-syllable words that isolate the initial letter. This method lets children clearly hear the individual sound being made. As you speak the word (e.g., pat), draw out the sound of the initial letter so students can clearly hear the sound as it i...

 Reading Awareness Goals in Young Children

Early childhood. The foundation for reading success is formed long before a child reaches first grade. Parents, care providers, and other community members should give children a strong base of cognitive skills related to print, background knowledge, and a love of books starting at infancy By the end of kindergarten, children should have: a great deal of experience with children’s literature; language skills that allow them to describe their experiences; familiarity with the alphabet; and th...

 What Students Should Develop During Pre-K and Kindergarten

Language skills At entry to first grade, students will need to have had a broad array of language experiences. Oral language, vocabulary, and other language concepts are crucial foundations for success in reading, especially reading comprehension. In particular, children need to be able to use language to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past. Early childhood programs can develop children's language by givin...