Beginning Readers – Setting them up for success

How wonderful it is to be able to share thoughts, memories and advice through the written language. We know what a gift it is to be a competent reader and writer but, it is more difficult to appreciate or even remember the effort and direction it took to get to this point.  Revisiting the world of the beginning reader is a good place to start when we are trying to best support our children make the transition into literacy learning. Beginning readers typically refers to kindergartners or first graders although some will be second and third graders.

To best assist our beginning readers, let’s first consider what early behaviours skillful readers have under control.  These are the early skills which we can be talking about with our young readers every time we read together.

• Book handling
• Notion of beginning and ending;  top and bottom

Understanding that:
• Stories make sense
• Print contains the message
• Pictures match the story
• Letters make up words/ words make up sentences (what is a letter/ a word)
• Left to right directionality (across page and within the word)
• Punctuation is part of the “code”(Capitol; . at end of sentence; !; ?)

Because we all read to our children and talk to them about books, we may too often be assuming that the child has these concepts under control before they do. We begin to expect that children will take on our higher level “teaching’ before they have flexibility with these early behaviours.  To best support our beginning readers, talk about these concepts with them in a casual yet clear way to encourage mastery of these early strategies every time you read together. 

With these early behaviours under control, the beginning reader’s attention is freed up to notice the details of print, story and language and to begin to develop effective problem solving strategies. This transition to literacy learning requires a complicated coordination of skills on the part of the child.  Many researchers have dedicated their careers to this area of literacy development. Reading theory is a highly controversial area. I do not wish to make this about the theory of reading but rather about how to support our young readers. I am going to offer a very simplified view of the reading process.  In my experience the following information can help you support your child to use what he knows to learn more about reading and writing each time he reads or writes.  The goal is making the experience fun and successful for the child.

A child who experiences success and enjoyment with reading will be empowered to become a competent reader.  We can support them along the path by helping direct their attention to the information needed to efficiently solve new words and get meaning from the text.

There are three main sources from which the reader can search for and use information to problem solve on text: 

• Information from Meaning: including background knowledge and understandings of the world around us; information from the story and picture clues. We can prompt the reader to search for and use this information when we ask: Does that make sense? Or Try that again and think about what would make sense?

• Visual Information: including information from the letters, letter clusters, sounds which are associated with them (phonics), words, word forms and punctuation. We can prompt the reader to search for and use information from visual sources by asking: Does that look right?/ Does what you just said look like the word in the story?  Or Try that again and think about what would look right?

• Information from Language Structure: including knowledge of how our language sounds, grammar rules and structural cues which lie in the text. We can prompt the reader to search for and use information from language structure by asking: Does  that sound right?  Or Try that again and think about what would sound right?

Simply stated, reading makes sense, reading looks right and reading sounds right.

Using a clear, consistent language with our beginning readers about how to problem solve new words on text will assist them with internalizing an effective strategic language. Supporting our beginning readers this way encourages and empowers them to make a well guided attempt when faced with new words.

As parents, we can model how we problem solve and check that what we read indeed matches the text.  Using the same clear language as suggested above will help clarify and reinforce effective strategies that the child can use.  Also key to success is honouring the readers attempts- correct or not.  Praising them for what they did do correctly (even if it is simply the fact that they made an attempt.) and then shaping their use of information to quickly solve new words.

For example, if a child reads sand for beach we might say: “What you read makes sense but sand starts with s and this word starts with b.  Let’s try that again and think about what would make sense and look right.”  You will most likely have to help them search for more visual information beyond the first letter to solve the new word.  It is always helpful to reinforce the strategic behaviour just used: “Yes, beach makes sense and looks right. Let’s check it: I like to play on the BEACH (repeating the sentence to check meaning and saying the word slowly and smoothly to check for sound letter association).

By teaching and modeling for our beginning readers that there are many ways to solve new words and many ways to check attempts we are setting them up for success. The more successful reading experiences the child has, the easier learning to read becomes.

Britta is a Toronto mom with two sons aged 2 and 4.  She is currently on leave from the Toronto Board where she worked in Early Literacy so that she can be at home with her two boys.  She has worked in literacy education for over ten years and is keen to share some of her insights into what we can do at home to encourage our children along the path to becoming competent readers and writers.