Reading Strategies For Early Elementary: How To Support Your Young Reader
When I was in elementary school, I remember other kids having to leave the classroom and go with another teacher to help them learn how to read in Language Arts class. Then it was called the “resource room.”
Fast forward 50 years, and it is now called inclusion yet those kids don’t have an extra teacher who will take them and help them learn how to read in their English Language Arts & Literature class.
This responsibility defaults primarily to the classroom teacher to provide this differentiated learning environment, often across four different grade levels, to meet the learning needs of 25+ students.
So this begs the question…
How much time does it take for a young child to learn how to read?
In the elementary school day, there are approximately 520 minutes of English Language Arts & Literature instructional minutes each week.
These instructional minutes each week do not take into account interruptions including:
Individual student learning needs
Announcements
Assemblies or events
Special days
School counsellor pull outs
Fire drills
Lock downs
Student behavioural outbursts
520 minutes per week divided by 25 students equals 20 minutes/week of reading intervention per student x 26 weeks of the school year (180 instructional days) which equals 540 minutes per year.
This equates to 9 hours of reading instruction per student each year.
This means students are being robbed of the other 11-21 hours each year of reading instruction as per research-based suggestions.
There is a significant oversight in curricular planning and government-funded classroom support in the expectations of students’ reading skills development in such short, fragmented allotments of time in the classroom.
In addition, over the past 25 years, I’ve seen and heard working parents who state they just simply do not have the time to do this at home with their children. Parents love their children yet may not have the skills and/or time to help their children develop a love of reading.
In recent years the needs of students have completely flipped from a few children requiring learning remediation in a class to more than 70% of the students entering a new elementary grade level having moderate to severe learning needs.
So… what can be done to solve this problem?
The five components of reading are:
Phonemic awareness
Phonics
Fluency
Vocabulary
Comprehension
Learning phonics, as a reliable first step in reading, helps the learner to predict letters and letter combination sounds. Once a child has learned the most common sounds and letter combinations, they will begin to sound out words.
Then, meaning needs to be made. Learners need to understand the different sounds of verbal language and connect this knowledge to written language. They must also have schema, vocabulary, and background knowledge to comprehend what they are reading.
Once these primary reading skills are developed, then the young reader will start to read words with more automation, which, in turn, they will develop a great sense of reading fluency while having time to address higher-level reading variables such as sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.
Finding the time and calculating the cost of procuring developmentally appropriate reading materials for each student’s learning needs is a daunting task for both parents and teachers. At Education Rocks, our lesson and unit plans have done this work for you.
To help you help your Kindergarten child/student with phonics try:
To help you help your Grade 1 child/student with phonemic awareness try:
To help you help your Grade 2 child/student with vocabulary try:
To help you help your Grade 3 child/student with comprehension try:
To help you help your Grade 4 child/student with fluency try:
Thank you for reading this blog post on how to support your young reader with reading strategies for early elementary.
The lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library will help you and your child or students right now and for years to come. The best part is you can edit these resources so that your child or students can focus on what they can do right now and build on it rather than internalize that they are not performing at grade level.