The Preschool Times

Continuing with our series by our guest author Sharon Alm

Your reading aloud continues as you watch your child grow by leaps and bounds!  He/She is reacting to and responding to your familiar words during routines, your rhyming fun, and the naming of the items in each book’s pictures.

It’s time to share another step along our journey to reading.  This concerns the realization of the strange looking “marks” on some of the pages in your books.  These marks are the keys that open and share each book’s story.  Your child needs to know that reading is talk, written on the page.  Each book is telling you something to share with your child….not just words.  This is the guiding step to reading comprehension.  Understanding and remembering what the words tell us is the meaning of reading.  It’s why we read.

It starts with naming the words and emphasizing the beginning sounds.  As you do this, make sure that your child looks at your mouth, when you isolate a word for him/her to learn.  Seeing your mouth change shape makes him/her aware of how words begin.

Hearing and watching you make the correct shape of each beginning sound teaches the correct way to say it.  Lips together for the “mmmmmm” sounds when something tastes good, or lips together then apart for the “bye-bye” words visually teach the M and the B consonants.  Imitations will soon follow, and you are on your way to teaching your child the letter sounds heard in our language.

Relating the sound and the written symbol for a word is a definition of Phonics.  Phonics is one way to actually teach reading.  But my belief is that relying on learning words by letter sounds alone will make your child a word-reader.  He/She will miss the message of the story if focusing on individual letter sounds of each word.  Most children learn to read by recognizing a whole word by sight, not individual sounds.

I also, strongly believe that every child must know the sound / symbol relationship.  The real study of Phonics is best left to classroom teachers.  Our written language is very complicated, with many pronunciations, blends, digraphs, base words and endings, etc.  Teachers are trained to present our confusing written language in an orderly manner.

Your child should know the alphabet letters and sounds by kindergarten time.  It’s an important part of teaching reading.  To help you as you begin to tackle this part of reading, have one or two sets of magnetic alphabet letters for the refrigerator.  Perhaps Grandma has a set or two left from your younger days!  They are wonderful!  Keep them in a container (aside) so that you can isolate the one or two letters that are used most often, at the beginning, for a teaching time period until the imitating begins and the connection is made.

Begin your consonant challenge with “Buh,” “Fuh,” “Muh”, “Puh”, “Vuh,” and “Wuh.”  These have the most obvious mouth movements youngsters can handle.  The other letters include “inside-the-mouth-and-throat” sounds that are developmental.  The vowels are the letter sounds that change, in our language.  You’ll catch those as your child grows.

You have more of this wide, wide world to share and lots of talking to do before you need to worry about your child learning “c/kuh” and “guh” and “juh”, or individual vowel sounds.  Remember that your child is learning a whole word now, and the vowels are part of that whole-word learning.  Each word comes as a package—-and if you outline it, by the way, each word has a shape that is also helpful to your child’s young eyes.

Peace & Light,

Grace