How Can Parents Support Their Child's Reading

The following information will explain some of the terms that you may hear from your child's teacher this year, as well as some examples of how you can help your child at home. After exploring this page, be sure to check out your child's grade-level page for more activities that you can do with your child at home.

Unlocking the Science of Reading

As you begin this literacy journey with your child, you will hear a lot about the Science of Reading.  The Science of Reading refers to the vast amount of research that has been conducted and focuses on how the brain works when children are learning to read.  This research has shown us some of the best methods for teaching your child how to read.  Below are some terms that you might encounter in your child's reading instruction this year:

Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound represented by a letter or set of letters.  There are 44 phonemes in the English language.  You can watch the video below to learn more about how these 44 phonemes are made.

Grapheme: The letter or letters that represent a phoneme. 

Phonemic Awareness - The ability to identify, hear, and manipulate sounds (phonemes) heard in spoken language.  At Highlands, your students will practice identifying single sounds within words and blending these sounds to produce words. 

Phonological Awareness - The ability to identify, hear, and manipulate any sound heard in spoken language. A few examples include students being able to:

•  recognize the onset (or beginning sound of a word) and the rhyme: sheep broken into /sh/ as the onset (beginning sound) and /eep/ and the rhyme

• identify the number of syllables in a word: holiday has 3 syllables; hol-i-day

• identify and manipulate the phonemes in words. This could be recognizing initial, medial, or ending sounds, substituting or deleting sounds, or even blending sounds to make whole words.

You can watch the videos below to learn more about what this looks like in your child's classroom.

Heart Words and Tricky Words - These are words that are seen frequently in text.  You may have heard of them as "sight words", meaning that they can be recognized by sight.  Heart words are words that contain spelling patterns that are not frequently used, making them irregularly spelled words.  For example, the "ai" in said  is not a typical spelling pattern for the short e sound.  Tricky Words are considered tricky because the sound-spelling patterns may not have been taught to your child yet.  Because most high frequency words are decodable once all sound-spelling patterns have been taught, the Science of Reading encourages students to sound out high frequency words rather than memorize them. For this reason, you will not receive word lists for your learner to memorize.

Decoding - Decoding refers to a child's ability to recognize the sounds within a word and blend them to create a word.

Language Comprehension - This refers to a child's ability to understand the meaning of words and speech.  At home, you can read books together and discuss difficult vocabulary words and their meaning.

Comprehension - This is the ultimate goal of reading. Comprehension refers to a child's ability to make meaning of the text they have read.  When reading with your child, it is important to ask open-ended questions, encourage them to make predications, and foster discussions about the characters and where the story takes place. It is also important that when able, help your child make connections between what was read and their own real life experiences.