Welcome Parents

We are here to help you raise a reader. Because you want the best for your child, we invite you to begin a routine which will benefit your child the rest of their life:

Read aloud together 20 minutes a day from birth though elementary school. This can be a bonding time you and your child look forward to each day/evening. Children whose parents read with them have more success as readers and in life. Pediatricians are now prescribing read-alouds alongside their nutrition and health advice in recognition of the proven benefits on brain development and vocabulary acquisition.

https://www.litworld.org/blog/2014/8/29/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-power-of-literacy

Getting your child ready to read is getting your child ready to succeed in school. Schools deliver 85% of the curriculum using printed words in books, written words on chalkboards/white-boards and digitized words on computer screens. Reading is the most fundamental skill your child will use during their years as a student.

The ABCs of Getting Ready to Learn to Read

AAloud

Read aloud 20 minutes a day with your child. Form birth to age five, this enjoyable activity provides essential pre-literacy preparation before entering school.

BBasic Knowledge

Ideally, at age five and before entering kindergarden, your child can:

• Listen to a book and retell the beginning, middle, and end
• Recognize upper and lower case letters
• Recite nursery rhymes
• Know the sounds of letters
• Speak in complete sentences
• Know that reading moves left to right, meaning comes from words, and pictures help meaning
• Print first and last name using upper and lower case letters

CConversations

Have frequent conversations with your child. Reading is about language. Immerse your child in it. Talk often, listen and ask your child questions that require more than a one or two word response.

Children entering school with these literacy skills are on track to read well by the third grade.

Stimulating Brain Development

Reading to your child from birth literally wires brain cells together in networks that later facilitate independent reading. Brain research shows that those linked brain cells enable a child to:

• Detect the different sounds in words (phonetic awareness)
• Recognize the letters and develop strategies to figure out new words (decoding)
• Develop real-world understanding of what the words refer to (create context for understanding meaning)
• Build an oral and listening vocabulary (the largest possible by kindergarden)

Bonding with Books

Reading aloud is practically free, you can do it anywhere. Even parents who are not fluent readers can provide a good experience for their children by telling stories from their lives, from their imaginations, and from pictures un wordless books.  It is best to read to your child early and often, but it is never too late to start.