Concepts About Print for Early Readers

Concepts About Print

• Pretend Reading: The initial stage of the reading process, where children become familiar with sounds, words, images and reading concepts from stories previously read.

• Print Meaning: Activities that demonstrate a child's understanding of print's significance. Questions that focus on the story's context, comparing their response to the text and pictures. Issues can arise if children respond solely to the illustrations without referencing text.

• Print vs. Illustrations: Activities that differentiate between print and illustrations. Such activities might involve asking a child to pinpoint words, spaces, or drawings.

• Directionality: Activities to establish left-to-right and top-to-bottom directionality while reading. Questions such as "Show me the direction to read this book" are examples.

• Book Concepts: Understanding the physical aspects of a book like the cover, spine and pages. It also involves learning how written language works on a page, directionality, word boundaries, and that print contains meaning.

• Kindergarten Print Expectations: By the end of kindergarten, students should know the basic parts of a book, match title to book, and understand the roles of authors and illustrators. They should follow the flow of print, link print to pictures, and grasp that text carries the meaning of a book and not just illustrations. Students should recognize letters and words, and phrases.

Phonological Awareness

• Differentiating Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Phonological awareness encompasses larger language units like words and syllables, while phonemic awareness involves the smallest units of sound (phonemes).
• Hierarchy of Skills: Phonological awareness skills such as isolating, blending, segmenting, adding, deleting, and substituting sounds in words, syllables, and sentences are ranked in a hierarchy.
• Isolation, Blending, Segmenting, Addition, Deletion, Substitution: These are fundamental skills.
• Word, Syllable, Intrasyllable and Phonemes: These are different units used for recognizing sounds in words.
• Activities: Recognize that Phonological awareness activities only involve words or parts of words. Phonemic awareness activities focus only on phonemes in words. This does not involve print.
• Phonemes: The smallest units of sound that can differentiate one word from another, crucial for understanding speech and language.
• Identifying Phonemes: The ability to pinpoint common and different phonemes in words.

Phonics

• Consonant Blends and Digraphs: The combination of two or more consonants together to make a new sound. Vowel digraphs function similarly for vowels.
• Vowel Digraphs and Vowel Diphthongs: Combinations of two or more vowels to create a new vowel sound.
• R-Controlled Vowels: The presence of an "r" affects the following vowel.
• Identifying letter names, sounds and shapes: Activities that include bingo, using alphabet books, or alphabet-themed games.
• Alphabetic Principle: Letters and letter combinations represent the sounds of spoken language. Understanding this principle relates pronunciation to spelling.
• Phonics Patterns (CVC, CVCe, CVVC): Consonant-vowel-consonant patterns and other patterns of letters and sounds in words. CVC—consonant-vowel-consonant (as in cat). CVCe—adds e at the end altering short or long vowel sounds (as in cape). CVVC - Consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant (as in boat)

Decoding and Comprehension

• Decoding: The process of breaking down printed words into their individual sounds, leading to reading, and comprehension.
• Fluency: Fluency is the ability to reading smoothly, accurately, and with proper expression.
• Fluency Strategies: Approaches to enhance reading fluency, including choral reading, repeated reading and reader's theater.
• Relationship between Decoding and Comprehension: Decoding acts as a foundation for comprehension, meaning that fluent readers generally focus on meaning without getting stuck on individual words.
• Predictable Texts: Texts with repetitive patterns in words, phrases or sentences, making them easier for beginning readers to anticipate what's next.
• Reading Levels: independent, instructional, and frustration levels reflect the difficulty of texts relative to a reader's abilities.