Knowing Where to Start?

Supporting your child's ability to read can seem overwhelming especially as their needs change at each stage of the process. Through this blog, I am going to break down different skills that children need and ways parents can support at home. I am going to avoid naming skills at different ages as children all develop at different rates. As parents, you can trial the activities with your child to determine what skills to work on and then introduce new skills when you feel your child is ready.

Before starting to support your child, it is important for you to understand the science behind learning to read. Research has proven that learning to read is not natural or intuitive like the acquisition of oral language. The skills that support a child's ability to read must be directly taught. These skills need to be taught in an explicit, structured and multi-sensory manner. Starting early and building a strong foundation of skills including phonemic awareness (knowledge of phonemes or sounds within words), phonological knowledge, and the ability to segment and blend sounds within words is essential for reading success.

There are countless reading programs available today both for use in schools and at home. Throughout my 18+ years teaching in public schools in the US and in international schools in Hong Kong and Switzerland, I have been trained to implement many of the top programs on the market. What I have learned though is that no one program fits every child. The approach to how reading is taught is the critical difference not the specific program. I advocate for a using a synthetic phonics approach because it is grounded in the science of reading.

Synthetic Phonics is a structured approach to teaching phonics through explicitly teaching phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). Through synthetic phonics instruction, children are introduced to phonemes and the corresponding graphemes in small chunks anywhere from 4-8 at a time. From the start, the lessons teach how to blend phonemes together to read words and how to segment phonemes within a word to spell. This is a key difference from other approaches which focus on teaching all letter names and sounds before introducing the skills of how to use them.

The term Science of Reading refers to the information that came from multiple evidence-based studies conducted around the world in the early 21st century. If you are interested in learning more about the Science of Reading then check out the podcast Sold a Story (https://open.spotify.com/show/0tcUMXBFMGMe8w79MM5QCI) or you can take a step further and read the studies.

• Rose Report (2006), United Kingdom

• National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence/Based Assessment of the Scientific Research ad Its Implications for Reading Instruction (2006), United States

• National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (2005), Australia