Helping foster a growth mindset in children is critical for their sucess and heres why. A growth mindset, is a belief that through hard work and embracing challenges one can improve at anything. A person with a growth mindset works harder when the task gets harder and they strive to learn from their mistake rather than sulking with their head down. On the other hand, a person with a fixed mindset identifies as smart when they do well on a test and identifies with being dumb when they do poorly on the test. You see, the person with the fixed mindset gets frustrated and gives up, while the person with the growth mindset gets upset and is quickly motivated to improve and learn from their mistakes due to their constant belief that they can improve and grow through hardwork. 

Carol Dweck’s research makes it clear that praising children for their effort will help them improve through challenges while praising children for their intelligence will cause them to struggle through challenges. 

Phonemic or phonological awareness refers to a childs ability to hear individual sounds in a word, and blend, stretch, or manipulate those sounds. Research has shown this skill to be critical before children learn how to read fluently. So what does this look and sound like? A child needs to be able to hear and identify which words start with the same sound or end with the same sound (Rhyming). They also need to be able to swap the beginning or ending sounds in words to create new words. These skills help build a foundational awareness in the brain that some words have the same sound and some words have different sounds. 

Phonics lessons teach children that letters are associated with sounds. The learning of letter sounds help children learn to read, becuase they allow children to decode or break apart the sounds in each word before blending them together. This gives them a "tool" to read words they may have heard but not read before. 

Reading fluency refers to a childs' ability to read words automatically, accurately, and with expression. That means, the child doesn't need to decode the sounds of the word, they know the word by sight. Often, we measure children's fluency based on how many words they can read in a minute. In the classroom, we improve fluency by memorizing "heart words", words that we see all the time in reading that we should memorize by heart. We also practice memorizing poems that contain heart words. 

Comprehension begins only with a strong foundation in phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. The research shows the children with the highest comprehension levels are looking at letter sounds in order to decipher the meaning of the words and the text.