Well hello again everyone! This is Kasey Wade writing to you and I wanted to spend a little bit of time on our blog dedicated to pre-literacy, early literacy, and literacy. If you have been around our social media sites for the last twelve months or so you have been hearing us talk a lot about reading and how this plays such a huge role in our kiddos lives for decades to come. I have been spending a lot of time learning and researching our role as speech and language pathologist in helping kids to begin learning literacy skills early on in their lives and ways that we can ensure they continue to be strong and successful readers down the road.
Do you remember learning to read? Did you struggle? Was it easy? What do you remember most about your experience?
Reading is a complex human behavior that does not emerge naturally as part of human development, although for some kids it seems to! Reading is actually a complex set of sub skills that we are going to continue to break apart to help you understand not only what your child needs to know, but also how to help them learn it!
Reading is a process that can be broken down into formula which can be explained as follows:
Comprehension x Decoding = Reading
We want our children to be able to decode and comprehend text in order to be proficient readers. The emergent literacy skills that we’ve been discussing this month build both the comprehension and the decoding portions of this formula. Your child should begin to show the emergent literacy skills we have talked about thus far including:
-Recognizing the alphabet
-Understanding a story
-Writing for a purpose (e.g., own name)
-Pretending to read environment print
-Engaging with a book
-Making up rhymes
-Playing with words
Stay tuned for a few more blogs on this topic 🙂
-Kasey-