Our Little Darlings in our school preparation rooms are thriving and enjoying the process of learning to read! Learning to read involves a process of learning and understanding the sounds and connections of letters in the alphabet. This is a complex process and requires consistency and time to achieve. This is how we teach reading to our preschoolers at little darlings.
Phonemic Awareness This is where learning to read starts. Phonemic awareness means that children become aware that speech is made up of individual sounds.
In order to learn how to read, children must be able to recognize that the marks on a page represent the sounds of a language. Those marks, are letters.
Alphabetic Awareness This is more than just memorizing the alphabet. Learning the Alphabet is part of developing reading.
Our curriculum ensures that children are able to identify which sounds in the Alphabet (phonemes) go with which letters.
Throughout the year we develop phonetic awareness in children by focusing on each individual letter and the sound, we extend this with in class activities to develop a concrete understanding of letters andtheir sounds
Sounds to Word Awareness -Blending
Once children are confident with the alphabet and their sounds we move to blending the sounds.
This enables making the connections between sounds and printed words.
To master this complex process we focus on sight words each week together with pictures. For example “at” words will have pictures of words with “at” in them such as cat and mat to make the connection easier.
Each week the children will practice to sound, write, blend the words and eventually read the word.
When they are able to manage it, we say they have “broken the code.”
Judith A. Schickedanz. 1999. Much more then ABCs. NAEYC. USA
