On the blog lately, we’ve been all about discussing emergent literacy. What is emergent literacy, you may be asking? Check out this blog post to read all about emergent literacy in detail. To put it simply, it means that spoken language and reading/ writing skills are connected. It is very important for children to show and be exposed to emergent literacy skills from a very young age to develop a good foundation for reading. Children begin developing these emergent literacy skills from birth, even though they don’t read or write until years later. To help help grow children’s literacy skills emergent reader strategies can be used.
There are 4 Main Stages of Emergent Literacy:
- Awareness & Exploration Stage (babies + toddler)
- Early Learning Reading & Writing Stage (kindergarten-first grade)
- Transitional Reading & Writing Stage (2nd -3rd grade)
- Competent Reading & Writing Stage (4th grade and beyond)
There are 6 Key Emergent Literacy Skills that your child needs in order to learn to develop a good foundation for reading. An emergent reader is one who is interested in books but cannot yet read them independently. I teach special education and have many older students with disabilities that are still considered to be emergent readers. (Link to January blog post-I did not see it up on your website) For this reason, I have had to supplement my curriculum and create many of my own materials that appeal to older students who are still learning to read. Over the years, I have discovered 6 easy emergent reader strategies and want to share them with you today.
6 EASY Emergent Reader Strategies:
1. Create a vocabulary rich environment
You can create a vocabulary rich environment in many ways at school and at home. Put labels next to objects and pictures in your home and classroom (e.g. the word clock next to the clock in the home/classroom). This way children will begin learning words by sight.
2. Identify words in everyday environments
Always label and identify things for your children and students that you are doing. For example, if you are washing the dishes, talk about what you are doing-”I’m washing the bowls, cups and silverware. Sometimes people say, I’m washing the dishes.” If you start this from birth, children start to develop a very wide vocabulary range from a young age.
3. Explicitly teach phonics
Focus on those simple vowel sounds and letter sounds. Practice letter sounds everyday! With my students, I go through alphabet flashcards with them and have them say the letter and the sound it makes DAILY. This repetitive practice will help them learn, remember and be more confident in what the sounds are. Once they have mastered the alphabet sounds, then I focus on explicitly teaching students the simple phonics vowel patterns. For example, we always start with short /a/ consonant-vowel-consonant (or CVC word) patterns. I use this CVC Task Cards Bundle to work on this skill in my classroom.
4. Explicitly teach sight words
Teaching sight words is SO important! Let me say it again-teaching sight words is so important! You must teach sight words to your students in isolation and students simply have to memorize them and familiarize themselves with them. Sight words are words in the English Language that must be learned by sight-they do not follow the general rules and cannot be “sounded out.” Some examples of these words- are the, and, of. I generally like to teach 2-3 new sight words per week to students and keep their sight words on flashcards for repetitive practice during small group time.
5. Use high interest/ low level reading books
Students will not want to read about things that they are not interested in. Having a 12 year old in your class read a simple story about a cat because it is at his level might not get him super motivated to learn how to read. However, if that 12 year old student at the emergent reader level is interested in something like bowling, then find or create simple stories to engage him to read with you such as this emergent reader about bowling using real pictures. He will engage with the story and relate to it because it is something that he likes to do and is interested in. Using real pictures in the emergent reader can help him to focus on vocabulary words that he might see in a bowling alley.
6. Use texts that are repetitive with good visuals
Repetitive texts are very good to use with students at the emergent reader level. It gives them predictability when reading a story and confidence. Repetitive text would mean that the text follows the same pattern page by page, such as “I see the dog; I see the cat; I see the ball; I see the hamster.” Students can realize and start to recognize those very simple sight words in the sentence and predict what that last unknown word will be using the visuals on each page of the reader. In my classroom, my students love to read this emergent reader printable about ocean animals. It even has sight word practice with it where students can use the velcro strips to build the repetitive sentence from the story themselves. This definitely helps to build their confidence in learning how to read! They also love to look at the real pictures of the ocean animals!
Those are my 6 easy emergent reader strategies! I’m sure that you are already doing many of these things as a new parent or classroom teacher! Just remember to continue talking with your child and labeling everyday items to them to help them create an extensive language vocabulary and start to develop some of those early emergent literacy skills.
What strategies do you use for teaching emergent literacy skills?
Happy Teaching!
-Jessica