Literacy Recipe: 3 Key Ingredients for Teaching Kids to Read

At a high level, parents need to understand the 3 key parallel journeys kids go through to become literate:

• Phonemic awareness / phonics

• Sight words

• Comprehension

It is important to call out that these all 3 can and should be worked on separately in parallel and are not meant to be a sequence. Each of these deserves its own deep dive, but I will give a basic overview below as an introduction and link off to deeper dives.

Pre-literacy

From the time kids are babies, they learn about books. They chew on board books, they point drool-covered fingers at doggies in books while sitting on Grandpa’s lap. They “help” by turning the pages when it is time. By reading to babies and toddlers, we are teaching them important basics about reading. We read left to right, books contain stories and characters and images that depict the words, reading is a great way to snuggle up with mom and calm down, books can make us laugh and imagine and expose us to things we’ve never seen before.

The most critical, in my opinion is that this early practice instills a key message: Reading is a happy activity our family does together.

Phonemic Awareness / Phonics

In English, our letters and letter combinations correspond to sounds. Understanding these relationships are critical for kids in decoding words they do not already have memorized by sight. Parents can support kids phonics education by singing the alphabet song, practicing saying the sounds each letter makes, practicing thinking of rhyming words, recognizing letters out of sequence, sounding out short words together.

Sight Words

Unlike the topic of phonics, many parents aren’t aware that learning to recognize common words on sight (without having to sound them out each time) is one of the most critical components of fluency. The more sight words kids have under their belts, the easier reading feels and better their comprehension becomes. There are many ways to help kids develop and strengthen their sight words repertoire, but repetition is really the key. Flash cards, recognition games, etc help kids at every level. Sight word lists are easy to find online and are usually grouped by frequency in the English language. First sight word lists typically include words like “and” and “the” and “me” and higher level lists include words like “maybe” and “cartoon” etc. Focusing on sight word lists has diminishing returns at some point and can be substituted with just reading properly leveled text regularly. The kids naturally get the practice within the larger reading activity.

Comprehension

Comprehension means understanding what you have just read. It includes being able to summarize what happened as well as being able to read between the lines to infer something that wasn’t exactly stated. It means really understanding what the author is trying to convey. Comprehension practices does not pair well with phonics or sight words practice as it requires the decoding to already be done. This means that comprehension can be learned by listening to text read aloud or reading text well below the reader’s ability to decode. Listening to podcasts, read alouds at the library or as a family, are great ways to practice comprehension.