Reading Readiness Starts Early
The road to success in school starts earlier than you might think. “There is evidence that three simple strategies, used regularly, help children prepare for reading when they start school,” according to Donna Donald, Iowa State University (ISU) Extension family life specialist.
Strategy 1 – Help children develop background knowledge through everyday routines and planned experiences inside or outside of the home. Background knowledge is the information, real-life experiences, and feelings acquired by seeing, feeling and doing things to gain knowledge about the world. It starts with adults naming things and talking about what they are doing.
“Take breakfast, for example,” Mrs. Donald says. “Say ‘I’m opening the cereal box. Now I’m pouring the cereal into the round, blue bowl. Look, the cereal is round too, and it has a hole in the middle. Now I’m pouring milk on the cereal. It’s cold because it was in the refrigerator. There, I’m all done. Are you ready to eat? Here’s your spoon.’”
Strategy 2 – Provide many opportunities for your child to develop his or her language skills by talking. Before children learn to talk like adults, they go through many developmental stages, beginning at birth. Children first learn to babble, and then repeat words they hear, then say single words and phrases, and finally talk in sentences. These phases are known as a language framework. The better developed this framework is, the better the chances that the child will be successful in reading and writing.
“Watch your child at play and engage him or her in conversation about play using words and sentences that match the level of understanding,” Mrs. Donald says. “Allow time for your child to talk after you make a comment or ask a question. For example, ‘You found the farm animals. Where do they live?’ Wait for a response or answer the question if the child is very young and has a limited vocabulary. ‘I see blocks. Shall I bring them over? What can we build for the animals? If we build a fence, the animals can’t run away. How big should the fence be?’”
Strategy 3 – Expand and add new information to your child’s questions or comments. When adults expand on children’s comments or answers to questions it helps them increase their language understanding and introduces them to other possibilities. In the examples above the child learned from the adult’s responses that the bowl is round and the color blue and that a fence can keep animals from running away.
“Using these strategies daily along with reading books and other printed materials with children will prepare them to be readers,” Mrs. Donald says. “A child who is successful at reading knows and understands many words, understands the basic content of a story -- a story has a beginning, middle and end, uses general knowledge about the world to bring meaning to the words in stories, and makes a connection with the symbols, the writing, needed to learn to read.”