How to Help Your Kindergartner at Home
The following are strategies you can use to further your understanding of literacy in the classroom, and support its development at home.
Please click on a link to find out more about these topics:
Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
Fluency
Vocabulary
Text Comprehension
Print Concepts
Writing
Phonemic awareness improves children’s word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling. Teachers use songs, rhymes, poems, and chants; work with syllables; concentrate on beginning sounds of words; and play word games.
To support your child’s phonemic awareness, you can:
• Sing alphabet songs with your child
• Read stories that your child chooses
• Point out letter, especially letters in your child’s name
• Play with language and rhymes
• Sing songs and manipulate sounds
Systematic and explicit phonics instruction improves students’ word recognition, spelling, and comprehension. Teachers help children relate letters to sounds and decode words in stories, provide opportunities for children to spell words and write stories using letter-sound relationships, and practice word families.
To support your child’s phonics development, you can:
• Encourage your child to point to words and say them out loud when writing
• Listen to your child read
• Help your child sort words by sounds
• Help your child define/read larger words by breaking them into smaller chunks
• Play spelling and word games like Scrabble and Hang Man
Fluency can be developed by modeling fluent reading and having your child engage in repeated oral readings. Teachers use oral reading strategies such as student-adult reading, choral reading, tape-assisted reading, partner reading, and Readers’ Theatre.
To support your child’s fluency development, you can:
• Read aloud often, encouraging your child to read aloud
• Let your child choose books to read and reread favorite books
• Model reading for fun and pleasure
• Act out a book or story
• Read aloud a sentence and then invite your child to read the same sentence
• Help your child read new words and talk about the meaning
• Talk to your child about how to pick out books of interest at an appropriate reading level when he or she goes to the library
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Vocabulary can be developed when your child engages daily in oral language, listens to adults read, and reads extensively on his or her own. Teachers promote vocabulary development by adding new words into meaningful conversations, teaching specific words before reading, and providing new and different experiences for children to research and talk about.
To support your child’s vocabulary development, you can:
• Read aloud a variety of genres
• Talk with your child about daily events and books you read together
• Talk about how the illustrations and text in a book support each other
• Search for new words in texts with your child and look them up in the dictionary
• Help your child learn new vocabulary based on hobbies or interests
Comprehension is the reason for reading. When good readers comprehend what they read, they understand it and can communicate it to others. Teachers support comprehension by using graphic and semantic organizers, asking and answering questions about the text, asking students to summarize important ideas in a text, and helping students draw on prior knowledge about a subject.
To support your child’s comprehension development, you can:
• Ask your child to predict what might happen next in a story
• Ask who, what, where, when, and why questions about a book
• Ask your child questions about the topic of a book before reading it
• Ask your child about books being read at school and extend them in conversation
• Ask your child what the main idea or message of a book might be
Print concepts are a set of understandings about the conventions of literacy, such as directionality, use of blank spaces and letters. Teachers create a print-rich classroom environment, help students track print while listening to a text or reading themselves, and encourage students to use print for a variety of purposes.
To support your child’s print concept attainment, you can:
• Point out the title and author’s name to your child when reading together
• Talk about where reading begins on the page and show how the words flow left to right
• Play games to match lowercase and uppercase letters
• Talk about how types of texts have similarities and differences
• Expose your child to many types of print
• Make a book with your child, using large print and illustrations
Writing allows readers to think about and analyze what they have read. Teachers provide materials and activities for students to build the fine-motor muscles in their hands and fingers. Children first learn to write their own first and last names. Then they are encouraged to write their ideas on paper and share their words with others. Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are linked to help children spell words independently.
To support your child’s writing, you can:
• Provide multiple writing materials and tools
• Encourage your child to write his or her name and the names of family members
• Let your child see you writing for various purposes
• Ask your child to say words out loud as he or she writes
• Respond to the ideas your child has written
• Encourage your child to write the way he or she talks, then ask your child to read the writing aloud
• Plan a time and place for your child to write every day
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