6 Skills Young Children Need to Support Their Reading Development
Learning to read is one of the most important skills a young child learns throughout their life. But to learn to read confidently, fluently, and with understanding, there are other sub-skills that they must develop.
I will be sharing these six skills here and taking a deeper dive into each of these skills in a multi-part series on supporting reading development at home.
The six skills young children need to support their reading development are:
Print Awareness: Print awareness is arguably children’s earliest introduction to literacy development. It refers to the understanding that print (letters and words) carries meaning and books contain print, which carries meaning and can be read aloud.
As children develop their awareness of print, they begin to notice that it appears in different contexts, such as a menu from a restaurant or a sign they see outside. Most children develop this awareness before they start Kindergarten. However, the role of the adults and their peers in calling out print helps support the development of this skill.
Asking, “can you find the first letter on this cereal box,” or cutting out and sorting long words and short words in a newspaper or magazines.
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Phonological and phonemic awareness is another skill that children must develop before learning to read. Phonological awareness is a child’s ability to notice and work with spoken sounds. For examples, noticing the word ‘car’ and ‘cat’ sound different or that ‘toy’ and ‘boy’ both rhyme.
Phonemic awareness is a component of phonological awareness but is specifically about children’s ability to notice, think about and work with individual sounds (phoneme) in spoken word. For example. noticing that the word hen is made up of three distinct sounds, /d/ - /e/ - /n/. It is important to note that this is related to only the sounds, not the written letter. So a child who has strong phonemic awareness will be able to say the word den and break it apart (orally) into three distinct sounds.
Phonics: As a former educator, phonics is essential in many K to 3rd classrooms. Phonics refers to the relationship between written letters and spoken words. Whereas phonological and phonemic awareness is all about noticing spoken words and individual sounds, phonics takes it a step further with associating these spoken words and individual sounds with print.
This skill is critical because it forms the really early stages of learning to read and spell words. For example, a child uses their knowledge of phonics to read words (decoding) will hear the word ‘den,’ notice the individual sounds and write the letters that make up that word. Children earlier in this skill may write ‘dn’ and as they continue to build this skill will eventually be able to write ‘den.’
Fluency: Fluency refers to the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Readers who have not yet developed fluency read slowly, word by word and their oral reading is often choppy as a result. This is because they must focus on decoding words whereas fluent readers have developed a strong knowledge of phonics and can focus their attention on making meaning of what they are reading (comprehension)
Vocabulary: Vocabulary refers to the words we need to know to communicate with others. There are four types of vocabulary: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
The larger a child’s speaking and listening vocabulary, the more words they will draw from as they engage in reading and writing. Some of the most fundamental words that a child will learn when starting to read are sight words (high frequent words), but there are many other context-specific words that young children learn through their interaction with others or with text which support their reading development.
Reading comprehension: Reading comprehension is arguably reading because what is reading without meaning-making? Reading comprehension refers to the ability to both read words and understand what was read.
What skills do you feel the most confident supporting your young children with?