THE WORLD IS IN YOUR HANDS
WHEN YOU CAN READ
RESOURCES FOR PARENTS
Parents often ask us how they can help their child become more literate, and look for guidance from us to help them augment their child’s literacy education at home. These resources will help you reinforce the development of sound reading skills, and complement the tuition they receive at our I Can Read centres.
LITERACY GUIDE #1 : DEVELOPING PHONEMIC AWARENESS
A young child must develop phonemic awareness to become a good reader. This means understanding that spoken words are made up of little, single sounds, which are called phonemes.
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LITERACY GUIDE #2 : PHONOLOGICAL GAMES
Following on from Guide #1, we explore the use of simple word games to help your child discriminate between spoken sounds.
LITERACY GUIDE #3 : RHYME TIME
Rhyme helps children to understand that language has not just meaning and message, but also form, because some words have the same ending sounds.
LITERACY GUIDE #4 : FIVE LITTLE DUCKS
If you’ve worked on developing your child’s sensitivity to rhyming words in Literacy Guide #3, this guide will help you move to the next level.
LITERACY GUIDE #5 : BEGINNING WITH SENTENCES
In this guide, we introduce your child to the notion of sentences.
Begin by telling your child that a sentence is like a very short story. Just like a real story, a sentence has to tell you something, and has to name who or what it is telling about.
LITERACY GUIDE #6 : DEVELOPING SENTENCE AWARENESS
Following our introduction to sentences in our last guide, let’s take a closer look at the idea that sentences are strings of words and that words can be counted.
LITERACY GUIDE #7 : PICTURES & SOUNDS PART 1
In this guide we will explore connecting pictures with sounds.
LITERACY GUIDE #8 : PICTURES & SOUNDS PART 2
In Guide #7 you gathered a selection of pictures of objects beginning with the sound /s/, such as snake, star, sun and slide, and the sound /m/, such as man, mouse, monkey and moon.
LITERACY GUIDE #9 : DECODING WORDS
The activities in this guide are pre-phonics and important to increase your child’s phonemic awareness. Play this game verbally, using it not only as a means to increase phonemic sensitivity, but as a vocabulary builder as well.
LITERACY GUIDE #10 : PHONEMIC FOUNDATIONS
We are at a point in our literacy guides where your child has learnt something about sentences and syllables and more importantly, a lot about phonemes. These tips won’t guarantee that your child develops instant reading skills, but they will lay the foundations of reading independence. This month we explore how children who are still struggling with phonemes can be helped.
LITERACY GUIDE #11 : SPELLING HABITS
Now that your child has a good grasp of phonemes, we can begin helping to prepare him or her for reading, by challenging them to work with sounds, and to ignore spelling habits. Spelling habits require your child to remember the visual sequence, but reading is the ability to decode the letter sequence using the sound sequence. With this guide, you’ll be able to judge how your child fares in the reading stakes.
LITERACY GUIDE #12 : DISCOVERING DIGRAPHS
and DIPHTHONGS
In this issue, we will now explore the strange nature of digraphs and diphthongs.Digraphs are graphic units in which two letters have combined to function as a single element of sound.
LITERACY GUIDE #13 : BLENDING SOUNDS INTO WORDS
Once early readers learn some letter-sound correspondences, they can learn to blend those sounds into simple words. Before you move on to blending sounds using letter to sound correspondences, make sure that your child can complete the same blending tasks orally.
LITERACY GUIDE #14 : BLENDING CONSONANT SOUNDS
In Literacy Guide 13, you taught your child how to blend two sounds comprising a consonant and a short vowel. With this guide, you can extend your child and explore the blending of two consonant sounds.
LITERACY GUIDE #15 : BLENDING CONSONANT SOUNDS – EXTENSION
In Literacy guide 14, we focused on your child orally blending two consonant sounds. Now it is time to explore how far your child can go before we move on to using letters.
LITERACY GUIDE #16 : SOUND TO LETTER CORRESPONDENCES
Over the past 15 guides, you would have covered the essential phonological territory and
laid down the requirements leading to this part of the learning journey. We have now arrived at a significant point in the learning where your child moves on to the relationship between sounds and their visual representations in letters.
LITERACY GUIDE #17 : SOUND TO LETTER CORRESPONDENCES
By now your child should find it easy to blend any legitimate combination of two sounds without having the recourse of visual prompts, like letters. Now, it’s time to start linking sounds to letters.
LITERACY GUIDE #18 : WRITTEN BLENDING
If your child now knows the common sounds for all 26 letters of the alphabet, he or she can begin to blend sounds by using these letters.
