For education leaders seeking to build an effective structured literacy program, understanding a student’s journey from emergent literacy to phonemic awareness and finally phonics is crucial. This post will help you understand the journey and provide practical strategies to implement so your pre-K learners are set up for reading success.
Literacy development depends on language competence at all levels – lower-level skills, such as recognizing and producing the sounds within our speech system, as well as higher-level skills, such as understanding meaning when listening to someone speak. Literacy is a secondary system, dependent on oral language as the primary system. The reciprocal nature of this relationship is extremely valuable for our school community. If we provide students with a lot of exposure to sounds, words, sentences, stories, and conversations, we will be laying the foundation to help them more quickly make the necessary connections to written language.
Emergent literacy serves as the starting point for a child’s journey towards reading and spelling. This is the critical period of time in which young children interact with and gain awareness of skills that support literacy development before they formally learn to read and write at school. Implementing strategies that encourage interactions with print and raise awareness of sounds, shapes, and symbols can foster a love of language and set the foundation for future academic success.
The journey towards literacy and a love for reading starts with developing print awareness. Parents and educators can nurture this by engaging children with stories, pointing out the front cover, discussing the title, author, and illustrator, and asking questions all before reading. Once you start reading the words aloud, model the directionality of print and demonstrate how punctuation impacts the tone of a story. Adults can also model the thinking that good readers engage in when reading, asking what might happen next. After reading, children can practice speaking in complete sentences by reflecting or retelling the story. By following these steps, you can create a supportive learning environment that sets children on the path to successful literacy development.
Looking for more information on Print Concepts? Check out our quick 4-minute video.
Phonemic awareness is the cornerstone of emergent literacy. This skill involves recognizing individual sounds within words, a key step in learning to read. To put it in perspective, think of the process your brain goes through as you read this blog post. Your brain effortlessly turns visual inputs into words that can be read and understood. However, our brains are not naturally wired for reading. We had to learn this skill through years of instruction and practice!
As an educational leader, it’s essential to ensure that your pre-K program includes activities that foster phonemic awareness, which can start as early as preschool and continue through the first grade. The process doesn’t need to involve long stretches of sit-down instruction. Rather, encourage your teachers to devote a few minutes a day or incorporate these effective skills into their daily lesson plans:
Tools such as Elkonin boxes and sound chips can help students practice these phonemic awareness skills.
As children get comfortable with these phonemic awareness skills, they should also be introduced to the concept of phonics, which is the connection between spoken sounds (phonemes) and symbols (graphemes). Phonics helps children understand how letters represent sounds, and how these sounds combine to form words. Using Elkonin boxes and replacing the sound chips with the learned graphemes can be one way to bridge phonemic awareness skills to phonics skills.
If you’re a principal or administrator, you can support the effective teaching of phonics by providing appropriate training in emergent literacy and a program that has a systematic and cumulative scope and sequence, explicit instruction in both reading and spelling, and practice using connected, or decodable texts.
Looking for a resource on efficient decoding to share with your teachers? Check out our blog, Tuesday Teaching Tips: An Animated Approach for Acquiring Letter-Sound Knowledge!
Children can also enhance their understanding of letter-sound relationships through embedded mnemonics. This is an efficient way to build automaticity with sound-symbol correspondences and help bridge sounds to symbols in isolation. This method involves using a keyword and a related picture to facilitate the connection between graphemes and phonemes. For example, associating the letter ‘a’ with the image of an ‘apple’ aids in remembering the sound /a/.
Here are the three characteristics of effective picture-embedded mnemonics:
As an administrator, consider encouraging your teachers to use embedded mnemonics over other popular methods to teach sound-letter correspondences for early readers. The embedded mnemonic method has been proven to show accelerated rates at which students acquire these sound-letter correspondences.
Help teachers remember that after initial exposure to a correspondence through an instructional script, it’s important to remove the picture mnemonic and present students with a bare letter, so they generalize the skill. The ultimate goal is that students see a bare letter and accurately produce the sound it represents. Remind your teachers that if students struggle to remember the letter sound, they can be prompted by the picture mnemonic to recall the initial sound of that picture, which again is the target letter sound.
Interested in learning more about growing proficient readers? Let’s start a conversation.
You can also check out our newest literacy training course, created in direct partnership with Dr. Ehri, Growing Proficient Readers: Dr. Ehris’ Phases of Development. This unique 4-hour course includes AIM's Animated Alphabet Cards with explicit instructional scripts to develop foundational literacy skills.
About AIM Institute: The AIM Institute for Learning & Research® is a non-profit center for educational excellence and professional development, providing educators with the latest research, technology, and best practices in the fields of literacy and language-based learning disabilities.