Reading Readiness

September 6, 2006

Kindergartners who bring a simple of set of reading skills to the first day of school can look forward to years of success in the classroom.

A University of Florida study shows kindergartners who’ve master simple reading skills as they start school tend to perform well through at least fourth grade. Experts often focus on letter recognition as the key skill for kids to learn. UF researcher Anne Bishop says word games can have the same impact.

Bishop: “Another area that’s just as critical would be phonological awareness and that’s related to a child’s ability to understand that our language has a certain sound structure to it and that by having children do some word play without even using print in front of them, we know whether children will or will not be able to quickly key into the whole process of reading.”

Experts say that can build a child’s vocabulary and teach him or her how language works.

Bishop: “You’re asking a child just to recognize that, for example, on a very simple level, if I were to say ‘how are you?’, that that would actually represent not one sound but three separate words and that within those words there are individual sounds.”

And that experience with words and sounds puts kids on their own road to reading.