Competency Standard II
Functional Area 6
Communication
Focus on Pre-reading and Language
Fostering Children’s Reading
Development
This Power Point will focus on pre-reading and language
skills for the young child.
The bedtime story is the
number one
indicator to reading success!
What the Brain Research
Says:
 Read to children, sing with children, and play simple games
with children. Do this every day.
 Spend lots of time playing with children.
 Communicating with a young child, even giggling with him,
provides patterns of understanding. Laughter, especially,
releases feel-good chemicals in the brain that increase the
feelings of attachment and self-worth.
 Language is fundamental to brain development. Having a
conversation with a baby is a great stimulant for the brain.
Anytime during the day is a good opportunity to talk with the
babies in your care helps develop language.
• The key to language development in the brain of babies’ hearing language
– lots of it! Children need to hear language from birth, long before they can
speak. Toddlers whose parents/caregivers spoke to them when they were
infants have large vocabularies and a solid basis for developing good
communication skills.
• The number of words a child hears in the first three years of life has a direct
effect on the size of her/his adult vocabulary.
• Reading has a huge impact on children’s lives. The relationship between
parent, or caregiver, and child grows through active reading experience.
Reading to children will lead to more connections in the brain. The two
elements of reading are decoding, figuring out that the letters relates
sounds to meaning, and applications, the purpose of reading.
• Have FUN reading and talking with the children in
your care
Steps Children Take to Become a
Reader Over the First 6 Years
 Hear sounds, see movements, and make connections between what
they see and hear
 Talk and listen
 Pretend to read
 Identify things in books
 Write with scribbles and drawings
 Identify letters and say them
 Connect single letters with the sounds they make
 Predict what comes next in poems and stories
 Connect combinations of letters and sounds
“Building Family Reading Skills”
Infants and Toddlers
Visualize yourself holding an infant or toddler and reading a book
to them. How different than just talking. Now you are showing
them pictures. You point to them. You explain what the pictures
are in a lively way. You’ve just taken the next steps beyond talking.
You have shown him that words and pictures connect. And you
have started him on his way to enjoying books.
Reading aloud to the children in your care needs to be a part of
your daily routine.
Talk with the children about what you are reading. You might point
to pictures and name what it is to them. Or ask them, to find an
object in the picture.
As the children get older do a “Think Aloud.” “We just read _____
I wonder what will happen next?” or “How would you feel if that
Happened to you?”
Late Toddler or Early
Preschoolers
Reading aloud together is the perfect time for 2 and 3 year olds to
begin recognizing what print is. Now and then, stop and point to the letters
and the words. Sometimes point to the pictures they stand for. The
children will begin to understand that the letters form words and words
name the picture.
Your classroom needs to have books available for the children within their
reach.
Reading should be fun! Put your voice into the story and bring the book
to live! It is much easier to be animated when reading a book IF you
read it beforehand. Know the story
Four’s and Five’s
By the time children are 4, most have begun to understand
that printed words have meaning. By age 5, most will begin
to know that just not the story, but the printed words themselves go
from left to right. (Follow the words with your finger). You also need
to model that they go from top to bottom.
This is also a great time to introduce children to “environmental
print.” It is crucial especially in classrooms for children from diverse
backgrounds. Environmental print brings the everyday world of the
children into the classroom. It allows all children to share together
the print in their homes and community. Empty cereal boxes, toothpaste and other product boxes, Sunday newspaper, coupons, and
colorful advertisements, product logos, junk mail, photos of street
signs and store signs. After all, what child does not recognize
McDonald’s as you drive down the street?
Hint: That is why we print children’s names at the top-left side
of their paper. The first letter of their name is capitalized and the
others are lower case. Example: Judy
Components of an
Effective Reading Program
1. Phonemic Awareness
2. Phonics
3. Vocabulary Development
4. Reading Fluency
5. Reading Comprehension Strategies
For Young Children We Will Focus on the
First Component
 Phonological Awareness is understanding that spoken
language is comprised of discrete sounds. It implies
sensitivity to any size unit of sound (Yopp, 2000).
Children need to hear sounds to develop phonological
awareness.
 Phonemic awareness is NOT phonics.
 Phonemic awareness deals with sounds (ears –
auditory) and Phonics deals with the connection of
sounds with letters (eyes – visual).
Phonemic Awareness
continued:
 Phonemic Awareness (sounds) and alphabet
knowledge are the two best predictors of later reading
success.
 Before children can understand phonics and decoding,
they need to know how the sounds in words work.
They must understand that words are made up of
speech sounds or phonemes.
Mother Goose
 I like to think that Mother Goose was the founder of
Phonemic Awareness.
Assignment: Part 1
 Google Search (or visit your local library): Mother
Goose
 Start a file of Mother Goose rhymes to be used in your
classroom. Copy a minimum of 10 Mother Goose
Rhymes.
 Now, think about ways or times of adding Mother
Goose to your day at school. After sharing the rhymes
with your class reflect on (the previous slide) and write
a paragraph on why Mother Goose could have been
the founder of Phonemic Awareness. How did the
children respond to the rhymes?
F.Y.I.
 I have re-introduced Mother Goose to many parents
and teachers during my tenure in education. This
included two of my sons and their families. All five
grandchildren know nursery rhymes
 P.S. Can anyone find the answer to the questions:
Who was Mother Goose? and Who was Little Miss
Muffet?
When Children Achieve
Phonological Awareness:
 They are able to think about how words sound. A child
who is phonologically aware can demonstrate this, for
example, by perceiving and producing rhymes (fan,
tan, man), they appreciate that the word “kitchen” has
two spoken parts (syllables, kit chen), and smaller
components (sn/ake), and putting them back together
again “snake”, by noticing that groups of words have
the same beginning (star, story), middle (bag, cat) and
ending (lunch, pinch), and the words “cat” and “king”
begin with the same sound.
Phonological Awareness
Activities:
 Rhyming - finding words that share a common ending
feature or sound combination.
 Infants and toddlers begin to respond to rhyme in songs,
nursery rhymes, stories, finger-plays, and poems.
 Preschool children can think of other words and
nonsense syllables that rhyme with a given word or make
up their own rhymes. They can tell if words rhyme or not.
Alliteration – finding words that share a common
initial sound.
• Infants and toddlers respond to songs, poems, and
games and nonsense talk with repeated initial
sounds.
• Preschool children can identify other words which
begin with the same sound (e.g. “Whose name
begins like Sophie’s name?” The emphasis here
is on the sound rather than the letter name. They
can sing songs which manipulate initial sounds like
the “Name Game” (Banana, Fana, Fo Fana).
Sentence Segmenting – identify the individual words that compose
a sentence.
• Preschoolers can identify separate words in a sentence. They can
take a word away from a sentence (as in game songs where
gestures are substituted for words: “My hat it has three corners. .
.” next round goes “My ____, it has three corners. . .,etc.
Syllable Blending – combing the parts (syllables) of words to form
one word. Children are distinguishing units of sound.
• Preschoolers can combine words to make compound words
(class-room, base-ball) and syllables to make whole words
• (pen-cil, moth-er).
Syllable Segmenting - identifying the units of
sounds that make up one word.
• Preschoolers can clap the syllables of their
names. Measuring words is fun! Have the
child put both arms straight out. Hold their left
arm still while moving the right arm as each
syllable is spoken.
The next three skills are taught to
kindergarten and primary children: On-set
rime blending, On-set rime segmenting, and
Phoneme blending.
Phoneme Segmenting – breaking words down into
phonemes (sounds). This involves listening to the
whole word and identifying which sounds or how many
sounds are in the word.
• Preschool children (may) be able to identify
beginning and ending phonemes. “Tell me a name
that begins with the sound /p/?”
• The skills listed in this segment are from easiest to
the most difficult.
• Did you notice that never once did we say get out a
pencil and paper?
Never once did we
say,
“Please get a paper
and a pencil”.
Children learn
From the
Inside – out.
The last thing we
do is give them a
paper and pencil.
Why Did I Share the Five Components and
We Learned One?
 As an educator of young children you need to know
that what you do is the foundation to teaching children
to read. The National Reading Panel took years of
research and documented the pathway that leads to
reading success. Your position with young children is
integral in their development.
Assignment: Part 2
 Focus on the age of the children in your classroom.
 Introduce children to rhyme. What did your lesson look
like, sound like, feel like? What materials did you
need? How did the children respond? What did they
learn? What changes will you make the next time you
teach a lesson on rhyme?
 Please write a one page reflective summary describing
your lesson and your thoughts.
How Does A Book Work?
 Toddlers watch how you handle books, they begin to
learn that a book is for reading, not tearing or tossing
around. Before they are 3 years old they may even
pick one up and pretend to read, an important sign that
she is beginning to know what a book is for. As a child
becomes a preschooler, they are learning that:
 A book has a front cover
 A book has a beginning and an end
 A book has pages
 A page has a top and a bottom
How Books Work (Continued)
 You turn pages one at a time to follow the story
 You read a story from left to right
As you read with four year olds remind them of these things. Read the title
on the cover. Talk about the pictures there. Point out where the story starts,
and later where it ends. Let a child help turn the page. When you start a new
page, point to where the words of the story continue and keep following them
with your finger. These things take time to learn. But once they learn these
things, they can begin to understand the structure of books.
Assignment: Part 3
Language Activities
 Choose the age group of the children you teach. You can
choose one of the suggested activities below OR create
your own activity to encourage the development of
language.
 Write up the activity and how you tailored (changed) it to
meet the needs of the children in your class. Write how the
child/ren responded and your own thoughts of what they
learned.
 Write one goal you will work toward in your room to increase
children’s language skills. What are some steps you need to
implement in order to follow though and reach your goal?
 Share this activity with your CDA classmates.
Birth to 1 year
 Play simple talking and
touching games. Ask,
“Where’s your nose?” and
then touch it and say
playfully, “There’s your nose!”
 Change the game by
touching the nose or ear and
repeating the word several
times.
 Do things that interest the
baby. Vary the tone of your
voice, make funny faces,
sing lullabies, and repeat
simple nursery rhymes.
 Play “peek-a-boo” and “pata-cake.”
For Children Ages 1 to 6
 Talk with toddlers often.
During lunch or snack time
sit and ask talk about the day
and what they did. Point out
colors, shapes, and sizes.
 Ask questions that require
more than a “Yes” or “No”
answer.
 Which flowers are red?
Which flowers are yellow?
 What else did you see in the
garden?
 Have a child tell you a story.
Then ask him questions,
explaining that you need to
understand better.
 Talk about books you have
read together.
Ask about his favorite parts,
and answer his questions.
Use terms events,
characters, ending, etc.
Ages 2 to 6
 Read “predictable” books to
the children. Teach them to
hear and name repeating
words, colors, numbers,
letters, animals, etc.
 Pick a story that has a
repeated phrase or a poem.
Together, take on the voices
of the characters. Stories
like the Three Little Pigs
work well.
 Re-do your library area in the
classroom getting input and
help from the children.
 This might also be a great
family involvement activity.
Ages 3 to 6
 Books that have no words
just pictures, invite you and
your children to use their
imagination and make up
your own stories.
 Play rhyming games and
sing rhyming songs. May
include hand clapping,
playing with balls, and
playing in groups.
 Act out a good story or
poem.
 Encourage children to makeup their own play from a
story they heard or made-up.
 Dictation – When a child
completes an “art” project
write down what they tell you
about their work.