Transcript How Do Children Learn to Read?

What are some ways I can help y child learn to
read and become Proficient Readers?
START EARLY: BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
What can I do
as a parent?
What happens if
I do not have
conversations
with my child?
•Read to your child daily
•Talk to your child using correct grammar
•Enroll your child in an early preventions
program and or pre-school program.
•By age three your child may show large
gaps in vocabulary
•He/she may have difficulty
understanding information.
•He/she may have difficulty speaking in
coherent sentences.
MY CHILD IS HAVING A HARD TIME
REMEMBERING INFORMATION
WHAT CAN I DO?
P is for practice.
I is for Intensity
C is Cross-training
A is Adaptively
M is Motivation and Attention
HOW WILL THIS HELP?

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Practice: Builds neuron pathways in your child’s
brain by repeated exposer to a skill.
Intensity: Builds neuron support by intense focus
Cross-training: Brings together different skills
such as language, fluency, and comprehension
Adaptively: Expose new skills just above your
child's reading level. Not too easy, yet not too
hard.
Motivation: Teach your child with high interesting
activities to keep their attention.
ORAL LANGUAGE SKILLS

Children that have strong oral language skills:
 Have
increased vocabulary
 Become better readers and writers
 Are better listeners
-Read to your child
-Talk to your child
-Sing with your child
-Give your child the opportunity to carry
on child to adult conversations.
VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT

In the beginning, children learn vocabulary from their parents by listening to
them talk, listening to stories and songs, and having child to adult
conversations. As children grow they continue to develop vocabulary in these
ways, but as the vocabulary becomes more difficult, they may need help to
make vocabulary meaningful so it can be stored into memory.
-Continue to read, read, read
-Keep in mind the capacity of the working memory
and focus on only a few words at a time.
-Have your child draw pictures to describe new
vocabulary
-Talk about new vocabulary and relate it to
something that your child already knows about
*(Schema)
Read books incorporating vocabulary and themes of
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

Phonological Awareness is a child’s ability to understand
that sentences are made up of words and words are made
up of syllables as well as individual sounds or phonemes
(Sousa, 2005).
- Children can practice clapping the syllables in words.
- Children can practice counting the number of words in a
sentence by repeating a given sentence and jumping each
time they say a new word.
- Parents can show children picture cards and ask their
child to tell them the beginning, middle, or ending sound of
the picture.
PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Phonemic Awareness is similar to Phonological Awareness, but it
focuses more on individual sounds or phonemes. This is the skill
that children develop that helps them realize that bat and ball
both have the same beginning sound or cat and hat rhyme
because they both end with the –at sound.
- Read nursery rhymes and rhyming books to your child.
- Get a variety of pictures that rhyme and put them on 3 by 5 cards. Make
sure that you have at least 10 different sets of rhyming pictures. Then
have your child try to find the pictures that go together.
- Sing *Raffi’s Willoughby Wallaby song using family members names. As
they start to understand the song switch from Willoughby, Wallaby to
Silloughby Sallaby and so on until you have practiced many different letter
sounds.
PHONEMES TO GRAPHEMES

Phonemes are the sounds of the letters while graphemes are the symbols
that represent the sounds, like the letters of the alphabet. In order to learn
how to read, children need to learn to recognize these letters and
understand the sounds that they represent. The English language is
confusing and complicated because there are 44 phonemes with over
1,100 ways to spell these sounds (Sousa, 2005).
-Sing the song “I Like to Eat Pepperoni Pizza” (Dr. Jean’s Silly
Songs, 2007). It is a fun way to show children how you can
change a word just by changing one sound.
-Play Spill a Word *
-Play the game “Making Big Words” (Cunningham, 2001). **
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE
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“The alphabetic principle describe the understanding that spoken words are made up
of phonemes and that the phonemes are represented in written text as letters”
(Sousa, 2005, p. 36).
When children understand that letters represent sounds and we can put them
together to read and write words, a whole world of learning will be opened up to them.
If children have heard these sounds in spoken language in a variety of situations it will
be much easier for them to transfer this knowledge to reading and writing.
Go Fish!
-Play ABC Go Fish*
-Pick a letter of the alphabet (B for example), then cut out pictures in
magazines of all of the things you can think of that start with the letter
B
and make a collage.
-Play I Spy (Find something in the room like the window and say, “I spy
something that starts with a w (say the letter and the sound as you
hold
up a card with the letter on it). When someone guesses the correct
object , then someone can spy something that starts with a different
letter).
DECODING/ PHONICS
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In order to decode words, children need to know the letters
of the alphabet and the sounds that they represent.
Decoding is when a student reads each individual sound in
a word and blends them together to read the word.
-Play a guess my word game. Using CVC words * Uncover each letter one at a time
and let your child say the letter sounds until they have all 3 sounds so they can
blend them together.
-Read with your child and help them practice sounding out unknown words. You
can also pretend that you are stuck on reading certain words and ask your child to
help you sound it out. This will help your child learn how to use the decoding
strategy when he starts to read on his own.
-Take magnet letters and create words by moving letters around and then blending
the sounds together.
Allow inventive spelling. This builds confidence, and letter sound correspondence.
Read decodable text with letter sound combinations introduced.
MORPHEMES & MORPHOLOGY

Morphemes are the smallest word parts that can change
the word’s meaning, like ing, s, and ed (Sousa, 2005).
Prefixes and Suffixes are morphemes.
-Play a game making nonsense words by adding ing and ed to a
variety of words. Talk about whether or not you made a real or a
pretend word.
-Go through magazines and find 2 to 3 words that have smaller word
parts in them. Glue these words to a piece of paper then write a
sentence and draw a picture using each of the words you found.
-Using a newspaper play a word hunt game and highlight as many
words as you can find in 3 minutes that have word parts like ing, ed,
s, re, tion, un, etc.
ORAL & READING COMPREHENSION

If children develop good oral comprehension skills through listening to their
parents talk, sing, and read stories, then they will be more likely to have
good reading comprehension skills as well.
-Have a purpose for reading.
Read to your child and ask questions about the stories
(Who, What, When, Why, and How ?’s)
-Talk to your children and allow them to carry on
conversations with you in their own words.
-Help your child to learn new vocabulary by playing
Balderdash *
Help your child form mental images and then illustrate
parts of the book.
SYNTAX

Syntax is the structure or word order of a sentence. In simple sentences
there is only one meaning, but as sentences become more complex the
structure of the sentence helps the reader understand the meaning.
-Take a sentence and mix up the order of the words. Have your
child read the sentence and draw a picture of it. Mix the words up
again and repeat the process. Compare the two sentences and
pictures to see how they are different (example The hat is on the
cat. The cat is on the hat.)
-Take a sentence out of your favorite story. Write the words on a
strip of paper and cut them out. Then take the words and see if
there is another way to put your words together to make a
sentence. Illustrate the new meaning of your sentence.
-Read stories and listen to songs to expose your child to the
structure of sentences.
MEMORY
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Immediate Memory is a place we put information briefly until our brain
figures out what to do with it.
Working memory can hold some information for a little bit of time until
we figure out a way to store what we have learned in long-term memory.
Memory is an important part of learning to read. There are many skills
that need to be stored to memory in order for us to become successful
readers.
-Play memory games with your child, like concentration to help
build your child’s memory skills.
-Build your child’s background knowledge by reading books,
communicating, and exploring the world around you.
-Create songs and draw pictures about things that are
important to remember.
HOW DOES THE WORKING MEMORY
“ WORK ? ”
Chunking
Gist
Transfer
•Because working memory has limited capacity, as reading occurs,
words and word parts such past tense, are stored as chunks form into
folders and merge together for understanding.
•Working memory stores chunked information for a few minutes and
then is replaced by each gist component i.e., Chunks, clauses,
sentences, paragraphs, chapters for comprehension.
•If a child shows interest and comprehension occurs, a child activates
already formed gists, from long term memory to transfer information to
years compared to minutes.
HOW CAN I HELP MY CHILD RETAIN INFORMATION
IN HIS/ HER LONG TERM MEMORY?
ShortTerm
Memory
Immediate
memory lasts
about 30 seconds.
Working memory
has limited space
and duration.
LongTerm
Memory
Connect prior
knowledge before
reading.
Repeated
exposure to skills
for retention
Help make
connections
through motivation
and high interest
topics.
SCHEMA

Our schema helps us organize and understand
information.
-Make lists to help you organize your
thoughts.
-Read about different topics and talk about
how these topics relate to similar topics that
you already know about.
-Look at pictures before reading the text to
get your mind thinking about words that
relate to the pictures in the story.
CONTEXT CLUES
Context clues help the reader make sense of
new words.
 These clues can be found in the text before
and after the word that is new.

-Read together and discuss words that your child does not know. Are
there any clues in the story that can tell you what the word means?
-Read sentences from different stories, but leave one word out. See if
your child can guess what word might be missing after reading all of the
other words.
-Pull a random word out of the dictionary and write a sentence using it.
See if your child can figure out what your word means. Then have your
child find a word and write a sentence to see if you can figure out what
his word means.
WORD RECOGNITION

Knowing sight words and other vocabulary will
help a reader to develop fluency when they are
reading.
-Practice sight words by playing sight word go
fish.
-Read to and with your child by pointing to
each word.
-Read and talk to your child to help develop
greater vocabulary skills.
FLUENCY
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
Fluency is what keeps the reader going. When a reader can
read a text without sounding out every word or struggling
through the text, there will be better reading comprehension.
Knowing sight words and having good vocabulary skills will help
a reader to develop better fluency.
-Practice reading the same text over and over. This may seem boring
to you, but to a beginning reader it is exciting because they feel
more and more successful every time they read it.
-Take a picture walk and talk about the pictures before you read.
This helps your child build some of the vocabulary that they might
need to read the text.
-Have conversations with your child. When children can fluently
carry on oral conversations, they become better readers.
I can
read!
SELF CORRECTING SKILLS

When children become more skilled in their reading abilities
they are able to self-correct or fix their mistakes as they are
reading. A child might read “I see a door.” and quickly correct it
saying “I see a dog.”
-When you read aloud to your child occasionally make a
mistake, fix it, go back and reread it again. As you model this
behavior, your child sees that it is alright to make mistakes
and fix them instead of skipping over it.
-Once in awhile you can ask your child “Does that make
sense?” when they read a word incorrectly. You will not want
to do this all of the time with beginning readers because they
will get frustrated, but once in awhile can be helpful.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chard, D. J. and Dickson, S. V. (1999). Phonological Awareness:
Instructional and Assessment Guidelines. LD Online. May 29,
2012 from http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/
Gay, D. (n.d.). How to Communicate With Your Baby. Ivillage. May 28,
2012 from http://www.ivillage.co.uk/how-communicate-yourbaby/82048
Ideal Curriculum. (2009). Oral Language Development, the
Foundation of Literacy. May 28, 2012 from
http://www.idealcurriculum.com/oral-languagedevelopment.html
Kididdles. Willoughby Wallaby Song. May 28, 2012 from
http://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/w120.html
Nemours. Reading Books to Babies. May 28, 2012 from
http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/learning/reading_babies.ht
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Sousa, D. A. (2005). How the Brain Learns to Read. California:
Corwin Press.