Week 2: Assignment 3 Video Clips Response

The 10 mini-video clips and readingrockets.org website provided a great deal of information on the different aspects of helping students learn how to read. One of the most important things I learned is that early intervention is key to helping build strong readers. Reading is made up of multiple concepts and ideas that students need to grasp and build upon in order to learn how to read. Among those concepts, reading focuses not just on printed letters and comprehension, but students need to be taught about phonemic awareness, the sounds of speech, and matching letters and sounds before they can move on and learn to read fluently, spell words, and comprehend a text. The earliest introduction for children to literacy is print awareness. Print awareness in children means they can look at printed text, and understand that what they are seeing are words. Students also need to be able to differentiate between the different types of printed words (such as story books versus traffic signs) and understand that both serve different purposes.

To help children learn how to read, there needs to be a strong focus on sounds of letters and speech. These two categories help students make connections to what they hear and say, to what the letters on the paper look like and what they mean. To help with this, it is a good idea to read to and have conversations with children multiple times a day. This speech and read along is the basis for students to want to develop these skills on their own. By reading to children often, and working with them on recognizing that letters make sounds, and that the letters make up words, students can continue to build on their knowledge to learn how to put together letter sounds to make up a word. As students continue to build on what they learn, they can work towards being fluent readers, spelling words correctly, and being able to comprehend text.