Early Reading Instruction

When is your child ready to learn letters? When a child can identify the beginning sound of an object, this is a cue that he is ready to learn letters. If a child can look at a picture of a dog and say the /d/ sound, he/she is then ready to begin learning the shapes of letters that go with the sound he/she hears. The letter now takes on meaning and is not just an abstract symbol

Importance of Phonemic Awareness

In the book Leaning to Read is Child's Play, (Maunz, Matthews, and Klein, 2001), the authors explain how as they worked with the children, they "began to understand the role the ear plays in reading. Not the role of hearing per se, but the ability of a child's brain to perceive the individual sounds of spoken language " p. 32). They discovered that for a child to learn to read, the child must go through a transformation period in which he "learns to focus on the sounds in words rather than their meaning" p. 32). This is why rhyming, blending and playing with sounds is so salient for a child in the early reading stage.