Reading in Kindergarten?
By Sheri Janzen
January 08, 2010
Many years ago when I was starting out as a new teacher in first grade, reading time was spent learning sight words, practicing phonics, decoding sounds into words and playing games to learning new words. Now as a Kindergarten teacher I am doing many of the same activities to teach my students how to become readers.
Most Kindergarten students have mastered the Phonological Processing element of reading which is the ability to speak clearly. The next step is Phonological Awareness activities such rhyming, sentence imitation, counting words in a sentence and counting syllables. The third piece of early reading is Phonemic Awareness. Here students practice blending and segmenting which is taking separate sounds and blending them into a specific word or taking a word and breaking it into each individual sound. During these steps the student is hearing and manipulating sounds without actually looking at letters. As students becoming competent with these activities they can also add or delete specific sounds in words to make new words. In Kindergarten most of these activities are introduced and practiced through playing games. Students are encouraged to mastery each area in order so often if you come into my classroom to visit you might see one group of students working on rhyming while another group practices segmenting.
Another aspect of my Kindergarten reading program is Phonics. We spend the majority of our reading time on recognizing letters and the sounds they make. We discuss consonants (C) and vowels (V) and look at predictable patterns that sounds make when they are in combination with other letters such as CVC or CVCC or long vowel sounds when there is an e at the end of a word. During this phase sounds are now seeing the printed letters as they manipulate the sounds.
If you come into our Kindergarten classroom you will often see my students working with groups to read predecodable and decodable books. During this time students are introduced to sight words by saying the word, spelling the word, looking at the shape of the word and then using it in a sentence. After we have identified the sight words we look at any rebus pictures that might be in a predecodable book. These are words the book needs for the story but they are not easily decodable. If a book is decodable, then all the words in the book are ones the student can reading by identifying the letter sounds and thinking about the phonics rules they have been exposed to. After a student has mastered a book they are encouraged to take it home and read it to everyone they can in order to show off their new reading skills.
As you can see reading in Kindergarten is a process that involves several steps but many students are successful and go on to become students who enjoy reading.
