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Integrating Pre-Reading Skill Practice into a Read Aloud
Read alouds, an everyday literacy practice that families engage in, are a perfect time to double down on literacy learning. Watch this video to see how I weave in rhyming practice and vocabulary development.
There are so many amazing picture books that feature rhyming. Rhyming appeals to children’s ears, and it makes it easier for children to be active in the reading since rhyming text is very memorable. Pick a rhyming book and read it many times. Emphasize the rhyming words. After several readings, ask your child to fill in the second rhyming word in the pair, like my son, Donovan does while reading the book, Dr. Suess’ Ten Apples Up On Top. If your child needs support, offer the first sound in the target word as a hint. Once your child can easily provide rhyming words from memorized books, try removing the rhyming pairs from the context of the book. A rhyming pair from Ten Apples Up On Top is drop-top. Ask you child if he can come up with a word that rhymes with drop. If your child comes up with top (or another rhyming word), encourage him to generate another rhyming word, like stop or pop. Nonsense words like gop are welcome too!
This video also shows how to incorporate new vocabulary learning into a read aloud. The illustration shows one of the characters walking across a power line. First, I ask my son if he knows what (the character) is walking across. He calls it an “electric line.” I then offer some related words to expand his knowledge about electric lines: tight rope and slack line. The common features of all three things are that they are narrow and skinny and narrow and require balance to cross. Children don’t learn new vocabulary words after one exposure, so I will point out power lines as we drive to town next to continue and expand the vocabulary discussion.
So much literacy learning can be integrated into the common, everyday read aloud. With knowledge of early literacy development, you can make your daily read aloud super powerful!
Word Sort Work for the Beginning Reader
In this video, I demonstrate multiple ways to use a word sort to build awareness of patterns within words. A word sort like this one is great for a beginning reader who knows his letters and the corresponding sounds and who is developing phonological awareness.
Here the child is contrasting words from the -an and -ad word families. When a child notices similarities among words, he becomes a more efficient and fluent reader, as he does not need to read words letter by letter. As you will see in the video, there are multiple ways to engage in the word sort. I model activities that progress in difficulty.
You can do a word sort solely with illustrations/pictures, contrasting two initial consonant sounds, with an emergent reader who is still mastering letter-sound knowledge. A sort of this level might contrast words that beginning the sound /b/ and the sound /s/.