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Components of Reading

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33 views

Components of Reading

Uploaded by

Camilo Garcia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Five Components of Reading


Learning to read is one of the most important skills children can learn. When
your child takes their first steps in their learning to read journey, it’s important
to keep in mind the five essential components of reading that every child needs
in order to grow into a confident and fluent reader.
There are many fun, play-based activities you can do at home to build your
child’s skills in these five core areas of reading.

Reading Eggs is designed by experts to cover all five components of reading


instruction for children aged 2–13. If you don’t have an account yet, register
online here for a free trial.
Here are the five key aspects of reading for every child:
1. Phonics

Phonics is the process of mapping the sounds in words to written letters. This
is one of the earliest reading skills children should develop, because it
introduces them to the link between letters and sounds, known as the
alphabetic principle.

A lack of phonics instruction in early childhood can lead to reading difficulties


further down the track. It’s important that children can grasp the concept that
printed text represents the sounds of spoken words. There are many phonics
activities that you can do with your child at home, which will help your child to
develop early phonics skills, although it’s important to remember that these
activities should always be complemented with regular reading.
2. Phonemic awareness

Children develop phonemic awareness by learning about sounds (phonemes),


syllables and words.

Every word in the English language is made up of a combination of individual


units of sound, known as phonemes. For example, the word ‘crab’ is made up
of four individual units of sound; c/r/a/b. Phonemic awareness is the ability to
hear, identify and manipulate these individual units of sound. It is one of the
most fundamental skills children need to acquire in order to learn how to read.
By playing word games, engaging in language play, rhyming, and simply
listening to a parent read to them, your child can develop phonemic
awareness from an early age. Why not complete the first few lessons in Reading
Eggs with your child now to start building key skills in phonemic awareness?
3. Vocabulary

Having an ever-increasing vocabulary is a fundamental part of academic and


reading success. The more words we know, the better we become at reading
and understanding the texts that we read.

Every child approaches reading with varying abilities. The larger a child’s
speaking and listening vocabulary, the more words they will be able to add to
their reading and writing vocabularies with relative ease. Reading a wide
variety of books is one of the best ways for a child to grow their vocabulary.
Some of the most fundamental words that a child will learn when starting to
read are sight words. These include high frequency sight words such as ‘on’,
‘I’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘is’, ‘an’ and ‘be’. The first 100 sight words make up more than
fifty per cent of most texts for early readers, and are therefore extremely
beneficial for your child to learn early on in their reading journey.
4. Fluency

There is a range of different skills that build reading fluency in young children.
These include strong phonic decoding skills, an expanding bank of high
frequency words recognized at sight, and the amount of time that children
spend reading books at an appropriate level. The more children read, the
better they are at understanding and reading with speed and accuracy.

Fluency enables readers to quickly span the gap between recognizing a word
and understanding its meaning. Since fluent readers no longer need to
concentrate on decoding the words on a page, they can enjoy the freedom of
focusing on the *meaning* conveyed by words and sentences. Fluency is
something that comes as a child develops their phonemic awareness, phonics
skills and vocabulary. Regular reading practice is essential to developing
reading fluency. It’s also helpful to note that by reading aloud regularly to your
child, you can provide them with a vocal model to help them understand what
fluent reading sounds like.
You can choose from over 2000 children’s books in the Reading Eggspress
Library, which are all sorted by reading age and Lexile level. Log in now to
start reading or register for a free trial here.
5. Reading comprehension

Great readers are deeply immersed in the stories they read. They visualize
the characters, they hear the dialogue in their heads, and they imagine details
beyond the borders of the page. Great readers think about what is happening
in a story and share the emotional journey of the characters.

In nonfiction books, great readers gain new information, increase their


vocabulary, and link what they read with other sources of information in order
to deepen their level of understanding of new concepts and topics.

These are all indicators that your child has a full and rich comprehension of
the texts they read. It is a complex skill that requires time and practice to
develop fully, but inevitably reaps great rewards. It’s no secret that reading for
meaning is the ultimate goal of learning to read. Comprehension is a skill that
will not only affect a child’s future reading ability, but also their academic
ability throughout school and beyond. Encouraging your child to talk about
what they read is a great way to both monitor how much they understand and
improve their comprehension skills. Read how you can build your child’s
reading comprehension skills here.
Reading Eggs is the multi-award winning online reading program designed by
experts to make learning to read easy and fun. It covers all five essential
components of reading instruction for children aged 2–13. Start your free trial
here today.
   
Blake eLearning Edmentum

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