1 Essential Skill to Prepare Your Child for Learning their Letters
Before teaching your child their letters, it's important to lay a strong foundation for literacy success. While learning letters is crucial, there are three key skills that are essential for reading success that happen before you start to show your child letters.
Developing Phonemic Awareness is a skill that is often overlooked and misunderstood.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. It is a fundamental skill that precedes letter recognition.
Engage your child in activities such as identifying the first sound in a word, blending sounds, and segmenting sounds (breaking apart sounds) in words.
These activities serve as a foundation for basic literacy skills.
Many people think that rhyming is essential for children but research has shown, that this is not an effective or impactful activity.
So what should you be doing instead?
The best place to start is having your child identify the first sound that they hear in a word.
You could say a word such as “bike” and ask them what the first sound they hear is- to which they would respond /b/.
This is a great way for them to see that words are made up of individual sounds. You could also help them count the sounds in words. b-i-k (3)
Similar to the research on rhyming, research on clapping syllables proves to yield minimal benefits- it will be more impactful to teach your child how to identify sounds in words.
Phonemic Awareness skills will:
greatly enhance your child's readiness
pave the way for smoother letter recognition and reading development
develop a strong foundation for decoding (sounding out) and encoding (spelling) words
By prioritizing Phonemic Awareness skills you will set your child up for success as they embark on their literacy journey. By nurturing these foundational skills, you lay a solid foundation that will support their letter recognition, reading, and abilities in the future.
Free Download: A Parent's Guide to Early Literacy: Mastering Phonemic Awareness
Are you ready to give your child the best start in their literacy journey? Our FREE download: A Parent's Guide to Early Literacy: Mastering Phonemic Awareness is designed just for you! This essential resource dives deep into the importance of phonemic awareness, a critical skill that lays the groundwork for successful reading.
In this guide, you’ll discover:
Engaging Activities: Fun and effective exercises to help your child identify and manipulate sounds in words, building a strong foundation for reading success.
Research-Backed Insights: Understand why traditional methods like rhyming and clapping syllables may not be the best approach, and learn more impactful strategies instead.
Practical Tips: Easy-to-follow suggestions to seamlessly incorporate phonemic awareness into your daily routine, setting your child up for smooth letter recognition and reading development.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to empower your child with essential literacy skills! Download your free guide now and start fostering a love for reading that will last a lifetime.
