- Read, read, read to your child! Immerse your child in rich literature. Set up a routine or a special time of day that you read to your child.
- Rich literature leaves lots of room for modeling comprehension strategies to your child. For example, this reading mama might say: “Oh boy, that character really is in a pickle. I predict that he will…” In this stage, kids begin to read themselves. The kinds of books they can read independently don’t typically lend themselves to comprehension, so it is important that you read books that do.
Word Study
- Short vowels, initially through word families.
- Comparing the sounds/patterns in different short vowels
- Towards the middle and end of this stage, work on blends and digraphs. Words Their Way: Word Sorts for Letter-Name Alphabetic Spellers has some great sorts with pictures to help kids with these.
Word Walls/Sight Words
If you haven’t already, create a Word Wall at home of high frequency (or sight) words. The first 100 sight words alone make up about 50% of what we read. This is the stage where the sight word vocabulary begins to really stick. At this stage, I only introduced 1-2 sight words a week; and both were different visually from one another.
Texts for Child to Read
Make sure that the text your child reads is developmentally appropriate. There are a few kinds of texts that I have my young readers read aloud to me.
Predictable texts- these are books that repeat a phrase over and over again. Example: I like to jump. I like to run. I like to draw. I like to read. (You can view some of the early emergent and emergent texts I’ve written here.)
Decodable texts- written to practice a particular phonics skill. Example: Dan ran to the tan van to get a can. Bob Books are a great place to start with decodable readers.
Poetry-this is one I wrote for Thanksgiving and it stayed up for 2 weeks. I hung it in our kitchen and ALuv would read it quite often. NJoy was working on his colors at the same time, so it served both purposes.
Morning Message- For a great explanation of a morning message, see Carissa’s post. I’m not so consistent with doing one each day. But when I do, I write mine on a dry erase board and it gives ALuv an authentic reason to read.
Re-read Texts for Fluency
Fluency does not come the first time a child reads a text. I have a box for ALuv of the books he can read with independence. Each day, he reads out of this bin for about 10 minutes (at currently 7 years old, his book bin is much larger that the picture to the right-originally posted when he was 5 and a half years old).