Learning to Read

From Struggling Kid to an Avid Reader

4 Easy Steps to Reading Fluency

For a child to become a fluent reader they need to master four distinct elements of reading.

A Comprehensive Guide for Parents

Learn how you can support learning at home

Pre-Reading Skills

Pretend Reading is the initial stage of the reading process. During this first phase, children are getting familiar with sounds, simple words, images and other concepts related to reading.

Think of this phase as the preparation for real learning. During the Pretend Reading phase, it’s important to emphasize the fun associated with reading.

Learning Phonics

In the previous phase kids learned about letters and sounds. They now have to start processing the relationship between those two, as well as the relationship between printed and spoken letters. When their eye sees a letter, the brain has to “hear” it.

After mastering the Phonics phase, a child should be able to read 600 simple words and read texts containing phonetically regular words.

Blending

Once a child has learned the basic sounds and connected them to appropriate letters, they need to start blending those sounds together to create meaningful words.

Blending phonemes into words is a crucial phase of the learning to read process. It helps young readers decode unfamiliar words using letter-sound patterns when reading. The key to successful blending is practice.

Reading Connected Text

Once a child has mastered the basics it is time for the longest phase of them all. Reading of connected text. In order to develop into a fluent reader, the kid needs to practice, practice and practice some more. Ideally starting with simple stories, gradually moving to more difficult, complicated texts.

The goal of this phase is to train the brain so they read written text the same way they listen to spoken words.