Breaking the Code: Primary Grade Reading Skills
Look for these signs of progress in your emerging reader.
Reading researchers often compare learning to read to riding a two-wheeler. Before she can travel on her own, your child must know how to hold the handlebars, balance, push the pedals, and build up speed. Likewise, to read a book, your child needs to sound out words, recognize common ones like "the," understand what the text means, and read fast enough to make sense of the story.
My son David desperately wanted to read, but midway through first grade he still wasn't catching on. Then one day we opened Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop for the umpteenth time. He confidently read, "UP PUP Pup is up." I was sure he'd memorized it. But he kept going, sounding out "c-u-p" on the next page. He read "in" effortlessly. "I know that one," he said. He didn't slam the book on "mouse" like he had before. Hurray! He was building momentum with only a few wobbles.
The National Research Council, the National Institute for Literacy, and the National Reading Panel, a group commissioned by Congress to determine consensus in reading research, identified these key skills to learn how to read:
Phonics
Word recognition
Fluency
Spelling and writing
Comprehension
Phonics. Knowing the relationship between the sounds of spoken language and the letters of written language is essential for reading. Phonics gives your child tools she can use to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words she hasn't seen before.
Reading milestones:
- Understanding that the order of letters in a written word represents the order of sounds in a spoken word
- Knowing the sounds letters make
- Blending letter sounds together to make a word /b/ /i/ /g/ makes "big"
- Recognizing word families: fat, cat, and sat all have the same last two letters, as do pig, big, and dig
- Recognizing letter patterns: "ee" stands for the sound in street and feel; "sh" makes the same sound in shirt and fish.
- Sounding out words she doesn't know, both real and nonsense: "sit" and "zot"
- Beginning to recognize the multiletter syllables in words: tiger consists of the two syllables ti - ger.
- Developing an understanding of often-used prefixes and suffixes, such as un- and -ing, -ed, -s and -est.
Word recognition: Many common words in English, such as "the" and "one," don't fit the phonics rules, so your child needs to memorize them. As he gains more experience reading, he will also instantly recognize other common words. This makes it easier to focus on the meaning of the text.
Reading milestones:
- Automatically reading high-frequency irregular words such as "are," "was," "were," "you," and "said"
- Instantly reading familiar words such as "cat," "dog," "mother," and "daddy" without having to sound them out
Fluency: To read fluently, your child must not only be able to recognize words instantly, but also be able to divide the text into meaningful chunks. For example, "lock of hair" must be read as a group to make sense. She builds fluency with lots of practice and experience listening to teachers and parents reading aloud.
Reading milestones:
- Reading aloud with expression
- Pausing at appropriate spots in the text
Spelling and writing: Your child increases his knowledge of how print works when he spells and writes on his own. When he makes each letter, he learns to associate a sound with it. At first he may write "book" as bk — because he hears the /b/ and /k/ sounds. With instruction, he learns correct spelling. "Reading and writing reinforce each other," says Barbara Fox, reading professor at North Carolina State University.
Milestones:
- Correctly spelling previously studied words
- Spelling a word the way it sounds if he doesn't know how to spell it
- Knowing the mechanics of writing — sentences, capitalization, punctuation
- Writing different types of compositions, such as stories, reports, letters to Grandma
Comprehension: To read, your child must understand the meaning of the words. It's not enough to figure out that P-o-p spells "Pop." She has to know that Pop is another word for Dad. She builds comprehension when she discusses what she thinks a book will be about and summarizes what happened in a story. Her understanding increases as her vocabulary expands.
Reading milestones:
- Predicting what might happen next in a story
- Noticing that a word she's just read doesn't make sense in a sentence
- Recalling facts and details from texts
- Describing what she has learned from a book she is reading
- Using new words correctly when she speaks and writes
Produced in partnership with Scholastic Reader.
