How much do you know about teaching reading to little kids?

1. Which should be taught first—blends at the beginnings of words (flag, stop) or blends at the ends of words (hand, fist)?

2. Is it important for pre-K or kindergarten students to know their ABC’s in order?

3. Which are the hardest vowel sounds for a child to distinguish?          A and E      E and I      I and O      O and U

4. Do children who can name many items  read better?

5. Is the best way to teach reading to have the child memorize words so that every word becomes a sight word?

6. Are all kids developmentally ready to learn to read by kindergarten?

7. What two letters is a child most likely to mix up?

8. If a child ignores punctuation, is that child likely to have reading comprehension problems?

9. Is following your child’s teacher’s advice on how to teach reading a good idea?

10. How many letter sounds does your child need to be able to hear and pronounce?

Answers

1. Blends at the beginnings of words are easier for children to learn. So are single consonants at the beginnings of words.  End of word sounds are harder to hear.

2. No, the order of ABC’s is not important until a child is old enough to sort words into alphabetical order—a second or third grade skill.

3. E and I are the hardest. That is why it is better to teach CVC words with A, O, and U vowels first, and to spend more time teaching E and I words after the A, O, and U words are mastered.

4. Yes. Research shows that the two best predictors of reading achievement are an awareness of letter sounds and an ability to rapidly name objects.

5. No. The best way to teach reading is to use a systematic phonetic approach.  Eventually, the words we read repeatedly become sight words, but we need to know how to decipher new words, and to do that we need to understand the rules of phonics.

6. No. Usually by age 7 most kids are ready to learn how to read, but even then there are outliers.

7. Lower case b and d are the most mixed up. Some kids recognize the difference immediately, and others take years to discriminate between those two letters.

8. Yes. Ignoring punctuation means ignoring meaning.

9. It depends where you child’s teacher was educated. In 2016 the National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed the syllabi of teacher training programs in the US and found that 39% of the schools teach what the research proves.

10. In most places in the US, 42 sounds comprise our spoken language. However, regional dialects can increase or decrease that number of sounds slightly.

How’d you do on this quiz?  Read comicphonics regularly to know how to teach your child reading based on what the research shows.