I’ve heard teachers say that first grade is one of the hardest grades to teach {because they come in not knowing how to read and have to leave reading}. That gives you 10 months! In some places they are now expecting kindergartners to be able to read. I was a K/1 teacher which means I taught kindergarten and 1st grade in the same classroom. I worked at a school with multi-age classrooms. Now this isn’t for everyone – it can be really tough having that age range together especially at that level. We also team taught which meant that 3 of us shared 60 kids. Crazy as it may sound it gave us some flexibility with our teaching.
Every September we had students that didn’t know any letters or sounds to students reading at a 5th grade level. What I realized in those years of teaching K/1 is that I love teaching children to read! So much so that my last year in the classroom I was fortunate enough to work with the students at risk. My incredible teammates split my class during our literacy block and I would take 3-5 kids at a time and work on getting them to standard. I absolutely loved it. Even better 90% were at standard or above and the other 10% were not that far behind by the time I was finished with them . Now that was rewarding.
So here is the deal with reading: it is developmental. In its simplest form a child needs to be proficient in each step/sage before getting to the next step. Children need around 2000 hours of laptime before a child is ready to read. Laptime includes sitting with your child reading, singing, rhymes and fingerplays. During this time it gives them a foundation for learning that pictures and words have meaning, there is a correlation between what you hear and see in books, letters put together form words. This is all part of the pre-reading stage.
Before you can expect a child to read, they need to know upper case and lower case letters by sight as well as know their possible sounds (44 of them). At this point they can start blending sounds together to form words. These words need to have meaning and now they are on their way.
What kinds of things do you like to do with your child to foster reading? We’d love to hear.
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