Most of us have been reading for so long that it has become automatic to us. As we look at a magazine or newspaper, we do not have to sound out the words or ponder their pronunciation or meaning. Words flow in an unbroken stream, from the printed page to our brains. Our eyes are windows into a world of magic, adventure, facts and stories as we read reams of information. Libraries, the Internet, newspapers, magazines and books open to us a world almost beyond imagination.
It is only when you begin teaching a youngster to read that you realize what a complicated process this actually is.
There are many skills that you absorbed as a kid that prepared you for your first step into reading. You may remember, or you may have experienced with your own children, many different reading preparation games:
- beginning sounds games
- rhyming games
- matching games
- sorting
- shapes
- listening to and telling stories
One of the most important skills is called phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the ability of the ear (and brain) to separate a word into its individual sounds. You’d be surprised what a challenge it can be to learn the individual letters in a word if you do not have good phonemic awareness.
To illustrate the number of skills needed before you read your first word, here is a breakdown of the cognitive development process:
- You can see the black squiggles on a page
- You understand that those black squiggles on a page represent sounds (the same ah-ha type moment Helen Keller had with her teacher Anne Sullivan)
- You know the sound the letter makes
- you can individuate the sounds in a word that you hear
- you can read the letters in order
- you can understand the sounds they represent
- you can remember them long enough to sound out an entire word
- you can blend individual sounds into a word
- you understand what the words means
- you can remember the word long enough to read all the words are in a sentence
- Eventually, you can read and remember several sentences and paragraphs and understand the meaning in a story.
Our ease of reading can be taken for granted if we don’t understand the skills we’ve mastered when we were just beginning. As we guide our children through learning to read, it helps that we understand the process. We can do this by supporting them through all the steps and helping them identify, hear and understand sounds in sequence. This is our gift to our children as they embark on the adventure of learning to read.
