Who Taught YOU How to READ?????? Sit there and ask yourself, who taught you to read? Was it your Mom, Dad, Grandmother, Grandfather, sister, brother? Or was it you?

A child can learn to read in many different ways, they can use pictures, words, both, even speech. A child absorbs many different things through their senses, from their surroundings, all the while learning as they go along enjoying all that they can from what's around them. It doesn’t need to make sense to you yet, It just needs to make sense to them within the connections that they make between things to determine how they are interrelated.

See there is something called Environmental Print that children can begin to teach themselves with when they are younger. Yes there are books, and songs and talking to others that they can learn from. But you need to remember, that this is still early reading. Most of the things on the signs that they see from the care window won’t make a lot of sense at first. They will begin to recognize some symbols that they know the meaning of and when they see something similar they will think they are the same signs. Thus, the child is starting to improve their print awareness through their environment.

Environmental print is familiar print found in the child’s surroundings such as logos, food labels, and road signs. Such early reading of children are embedded in real-life experiences. Families can make lists, write notes to each other to help to start to develop a child’s language and literacy development, with Phonemic and Phonological awareness.

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to recognize the words are made up of individual speech sounds. As in aaa apple, or bbb bear. They are learning the sounds of the letters so they can form, say and understand larger and more complicated words.

Phonological Awareness involves identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language such as whole words, syllables, initial consonants, and word chunks at the ends of words, such as classroom, where there are 2 words in one (class & room).

The more common ways for teachers to help students gain Phonemic and Phonological Awareness are reading stories, having them tell a story as well as many other ways. But as a teacher, they need to be able to make sure that the students know and understand the things that they are learning. They can do this through assessments.

Assessments can help a teacher to distinguish where a child is in their language and literacy development. There are many different types, and depending on how the teacher teaches the students, they will use the various assessment methods to coincide with theirs. There are authentic assessments which can help in this way.

There is running record, which is used for observing and recording children’s oral reading and for planning instruction. What the child can do and what errors they made are noted and written down for instructional purposes

A teacher can use, daily performance samples, audio recordings, videos, teacher-made pencil-and-paper tests, student evaluation forms, surveys and interviews, conferences, and checklists.

Informal Reading Inventories place a larger emphasis on comprehension Informal Reading Inventories place a larger emphasis on comprehension. Standardize testing is a form also, but its not a favorite of students nor teachers.

Another type of test is the Monster Test Assessment Another type of test is the Monster Test Assessment. This is a Developmental Spelling Assessment, which is a list of ten words that a teacher will read aloud, and the children will attempt to write as best as they can. This assessment helps to reveal where they are in their levels of understanding of phonics and how words work.

When writing, children at first might not be able to spell words as adults spell them, but they write things all the same. Some may start writing with just lines, and give them meaning from what they gather from their surroundings.

Children then may advance from writing with lines, to writing with circles having each circle represent a piece of their sentence. They may write with pictures to tell what is going on, or squiggles. But they are writing.

From there they will learn to form and comprehend the letters of the alphabet, and learn words, both in writing and reading. Their letters in writing will be rough, and some may be backwards but they are understanding through experiences and through the things they begin to learn once they enter the classroom. It is through a child’s learning in this stage of development that Piaget’s theory of cognitive development becomes clearly seen.

Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development has four stages of cognitive development: Sensorimotor Period (0-2); Preoperational Period (2-7); Concrete Operational Period (7-11); Formal Operational Period (11-adult). In the Peroperational Period of development is where a child’s language develops and thinking is concrete. In this stage is also where a child begins to organize their own world.

The preoperational period is one of the most important periods because language develops here. Though it is the second stage of development in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the language development of the child is what helps to set all of the other stages up. Within it there is the language development, learning to classify things, placing objects in a particular order ex: by size, learning about one things in many different ways, and spatial relations.

Language Development is talking, listening to stories and describing things. Starting at the age of 2, when things to a child are still so new, they begin talking, and when they do, there’s not a huge chance of getting them to stop 

Reading Readiness!!!!! Through their development in the child’s language they will become ready to begin their reading and start to understand what is going on in their world a little bit better. Having reading readiness, through the ability to identify and differentiate familiar sounds, rhyming words and the sounds of letters; including color recognition shape and letter identification, left to right eye-progression and skipping and hoping.

These things all help a child to be able to read, and to develop their own emergent literacy where a child acquires some knowledge about language, reading and writing before going to school. So maybe, just maybe, YOU, yourself and not anyone else, taught you how to read. And now you know how you did it.