How Do Children Learn to Read?
You’ve got this. Learning to read and improving reading skills is a science. The Science of Reading, to be exact. When we first learn to read, we break the learning into five parts:
Phonemic Awareness understanding that each letter has its own sound and that particular combinations of letters make their own sounds within a word. Think of the word “Chat” can be broken into the sounds ch-a-t.
Phonics is how we match the sounds in words to letters or combinations of letters in the alphabet. When we teach kids to read, we don’t start with ABC but rather eat the sounds that will make the most common and abundant words. Think of how the letters c and k can both make the same sound.
Vocabulary includes listening, speaking, reading and writing. Vocabulary is a huge part of why multimodal literacy is so important for children. These are the words that we learn through immersion as well as those that are directly taught.
Fluency is the connection between recognizing words and understanding what’s being read. It links recognition and comprehension. When we repeatedly read the same writing, we are improving fluency by increasing how effortlessly we understand what we read as well as the tempo with which we read.
Comprehension is the understanding of the words and material we read. Students use other key strategies like fluency and vocabulary to decode the words they read and increase comprehension.
So how do classrooms support striving readers?
In 2012, Colorado legislature passed an act called the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development, known by its initials as the READ Act. The READ Act took a bunch of information and data about learning to read. The research showed that the biggest parts of learning to read take place between preschool and third grade. So they changed the school requirements to help make sure that striving readers are getting all the help they need to be successful before entering fourth grade. Now teachers use new, improved ways to not only teach the reading but also assess the student’s levels and add more support where it’s needed. The different supports students receive are called interventions, which ensures that the information being given to readers is meant to be the best individual support. Students can be placed on a READ plan and aren’t removed from a plan without having a collection of proof that the student has met all of their reading goals. READ Act plans and supports are backed by research and science. Teachers take specific training to make sure that the READ Act and striving readers have positive outcomes. While the READ Act isn’t perfect, it is being added to and improved every year to be a part of Colorado classrooms and improve reading success.