Showing Kids How to Read

Video Transcript

" Hi, I am Debbie with ExpertVillage.com and we are talking about reading to young children and having a great time while you are reading to your child. So one of the things that we are going to talk about is while you are reading with your child, even though they are very young it is a really important time to point out things about our language and things about print – the conventions of print. So while you are reading and you are snuggled down reading together, this is Silly Sally by Audrey Wood, you would point to the words as you read. Silly Sally went to town walking backwards upside down. Then I might go back and say look at that S and look at that S, why do you think there is capital S’s there, those are big S’s, I wonder why they are there maybe because it is the beginning of a sentence – could be. Let’s talk about how many words we see in the sentence because words introduce them just to letters, letters make up words, and words make up sentences. So let’s talk about how many words are in this sentence, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine words in that sentence. Now let’s look at just that word, how many letters are in that word? One-two-three-four-five, now let’s look – we start reading here and my finger always goes this way. Directionality, showing that you start reading on the left and you go to the right and then we move down to the next sentence, so we start from the top to bottom. Now your child is not going to be able to repeat that for you and they are not going to be able internalize that at a young age but your constant modeling and talk about that is very, very important exposing them to the conventions of print. Talk about punctuation – what is that little dot down there for? It is called a period, period means you are finished, that sentence is done. There is another mark right there and it is called a comma, that means something else is coming. You have to pause for a minute because something else is coming. So take time to stop every page and so often and talk about those things, you will be amazed how quickly your child picks up on that and becomes familiar with it and starts noticing it in other forms of print. "