Learning To Read: How Teachers Can Support Their Skills

In this week’s reading, the focus was on how children learn to read and ways in which teachers can support their skills. In early childhood, learning how to read sets the foundation for their future endeavors so it is important to help them gain the skills they need. It was mentioned how the role of the teacher’s is to provide students with many opportunities to do so through planned lessons and interactive activities. Also that children learn through reading processes that involves decoding and comprehension. It was also stressed that fluency, which is sometimes overlooked, is actually a very essential skill for students to have because it allows them to become advanced readers by being able to focus more on the meaning of readings.

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Before first grade, the instruction focused more on the foundation like phonological awareness, alphabet letter knowledge, and print awareness. But in first grade and beyond, the focus expands to phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The reading mentioned how students learn these things in a processing the print and the meaning. Processing the print includes things like semantic cues, syntactic cues, and grapheme-phoneme cues. And processing the meaning would mean that the reader can use their prior knowledge of experiences and vocabulary to comprehend the text. This reading process was described as a repeating loop of predicting, checking, and integrating strategies. Two points about the reading method was also said that I thought were interesting. First is how they mentioned that the reading process is the same for everyone no matter the age of the reader. They said that this is because they all use these similar strategies and their own experiences to problem solve with print. However, I would argue that although it may be similar it is not always exactly the same for everyone. No child is identical to the other and some may have difficulties using these strategies. But I do agree with the second point which is that reading instruction needs to be intentional and have a purpose. Each lesson should be planned thoughtfully ahead of time and prove opportunities for students to practice. This is important because beginning reading instruction sets the foundation for the student’s ability to read in the