Do you know what is the one thing that every word has? A vowel! Vowels are the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y can act as a vowel.  When reading smaller words in English, vowels are an important driver for how we read the word!  For this reason, it is important to learn that vowels can make more than one sound! When learning to read, the first sound we learn is the short vowel sound.

A reading space promotes literacy because it gives children immediate access to books. When collecting books for your reading space, include various genres, topics, and reading levels. The space can accommodate the child at various developmental stages with a few minor book swaps.

“It’s a wonderful thing to read,” says Yesim, a Cultivating Literacy parent. While sharing her love for reading, Yesim recounts how she used it to bring her family together and became a favorite activity in their household. True, everyone has different literacy experiences, yet yours can be just as impactful with your children by following a few simple steps:

When spelling words, your child breaks the word down into individual units of sounds (phonemes) and identifies letter(s) that create the sound. Pound-tap-pound is an active strategy used to break words down into their sounds by using your fingers to signify each sound.

Using a theme is one way to help choose a story for storytime and engage your child in learning as well as their interests. A theme is what a story is generally about and why it was written.

Blending is the process of combining sounds together to create a word. Segmenting is the process of breaking a word down into its individual sounds. Both blending and segmenting are important reading and writing foundations.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide further detail about phonics and how to introduce new letters. Phonics is learning a letter or a group of letters (s) and their sounds.

Phonics is learning a letter or a group of letters (s) and their sounds.

Learn ways to help your child’s vocabulary grow by using storytime and having conversations about the story together.

Retelling is the process of recalling the events that happened in a story in order from the beginning, middle, to end. Retelling is used to promote comprehension, which is the process of understanding what is being read and building on new information by connecting it with other stories or real-life events.