Your Kindergartner and Reading
Kindergartners learn reading-readiness skills. They build their vocabulary and learn the relationship of sounds to letters.
In Your Child's Classroom
Reading readiness skills
Throughout the year your kindergartner is being introduced to skills that will prepare him to read.
He is working with the letters of the alphabet, building his vocabulary and beginning to understand that reading is a way to derive meaning from print. He is immersed in a print-rich environment that will help him develop an awareness and understanding of spoken and written language.
Reading specialist Jennifer Thompson explains: "As children use language, they reveal their working knowledge of the rules of language, how to use them, and put words and parts of words together in meaningful ways."
Books and print
Your child is learning how books are read from front cover to back cover, from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, and from left to right. By the end of the year, she will recognize the parts of a book such as the cover, title page and table of contents.
The letter-sound relationship
Your kindergartner is learning the relationship of sounds to letters so that he can decode written words. He should be getting repeated practice working with letters and their sounds, perhaps by sorting picture cards according to their beginning sounds. He practices blending sounds together to make words and breaking words down into separate sounds. He learns the building blocks of words by clapping out the syllables along with the teacher. Kindergartners begin to read easy books to practice the letter-sound relationship they are learning. They learn to recognize frequently used words, such as is and here.
Reading for meaning
Your kindergartner is learning to derive meaning from what is read aloud and what she reads. You can expect her to recognize the sequence of events in a story, and their cause and effect, as well as to anticipate the possible outcome. She learns to retell familiar stories, summarizing the main ideas and plot. She can identify the characters, settings and important events. The class may act out a story with props to show that the children understand the characters and plot.
Reading aloud
Kindergarteners frequently listen to books being read aloud. Listening to a teacher or parent provides a model of fluent reading and helps children develop a positive attitude toward books. It also helps your child understand vocabulary and language patterns in texts.
Books read aloud are often discussed before, during and after the reading to increase involvement and understanding of the text. "This conversation is critical," says Thompson, "for it helps children build their background knowledge when adults model their thinking, experiences and images that come to mind as they read. Children can use this to connect what the author is saying, to what they already know."
Shared reading experience
Your kindergartner may take part in shared reading, an interactive reading experience. During shared reading your child joins in the reading of a big book, one with enlarged text that the whole class can see, guided by his teacher. During the reading, children are actively involved. The teacher may pause to teach vocabulary, introduce a reading skill and encourage the students to predict what comes next. Your kindergartner should be able to follow along with the text and pictures while the book is being read. The book is typically read multiple times over several days. "Active involvement between student and teacher motivates interest, enhances comprehension of story and sense of story structure," says Thompson.
By the end of kindergarten you can expect your child to do the following:
- Recognize the shapes and names of all upper- and lower-case letters
- Identify beginning and ending sounds
- Identify short vowel sounds
- Match consonant sounds to their appropriate letters
- Recognize and produce rhyming words
- Read one-syllable words such as cat
- Read frequently seen words such as you and the
- Recognize that words are separated by spaces
- Read and explain her own writing and drawings
- Identify common signs and logos
- Use pictures to make predictions about content
- Retell familiar stories using beginning, middle and end
- Discuss characters in a story
What to Look for When You Visit
- Charts displayed with poems, songs and chants in enlarged text
- Books with print and pictures that are big enough for the whole class to read together. Your kindergartner may be given a smaller version of the same book to follow along
- Predictable books, which use repetitive language, sequences, rhythms and rhymes. They allow early readers to predict what the sentences are going to say
- Decodable books, which have the phonics elements and high-frequency words that your child has been taught in class
- Leveled books, which are books organized in levels of difficulty from the easy ones for a beginning reader to longer, more complex books for advanced readers. The leveling of texts allows teachers to match books with an individual student's reading ability
- A reading area with a class library of books and a place for students to sit comfortably and read
- A listening center with a tape recorder, earphones, tapes of stories and multiple copies of the accompanying text. Listening to the tapes provides a model for fluent reading
- An ABC center, where students can do different activities with letters, such as an upper- and lower-case match, a letter sort and an alphabet bingo game
- A word wall, which is a list of words displayed in alphabetical order on a bulletin board, used for reference and to reinforce vocabulary words
Reading specialist Jennifer Thompson recommends these books on reading:
Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever, by Mem Fox (Harvest Books, 2001).
The Read Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 5th edition August, 2001).
Read to Me 2000: Raising Kids Who Love to Read, by Bernice E. Cullinan (Cartwheel, August, 2000).
Updated February 2008
More on GreatSchools.net
