What is Reading?
 
bulletReading

The skills to becoming a reader starts the day a person is born. The sounds they hear become words, words lead to sentences and sentences to full conversations. Connecting the words to their meaning and learning to speak the words, children become story tellers, giving detail and meaning to what they are saying.  Later they learn that  words can be written so they can be read. And soon a whole new world is in front of them through books and great literature. When you stop to think about it, reading is nothing more than listening to someone else tell you something, only it's through words on a paper.  Usually that's because the person is not there to tell you themselves.  Just think of all we can learn from people close and far away from just reading their words. These people (known as Authors)  are sharing what they know, what they dream, what they imagine, how they feel and what they have discovered. We are all Authors, each time we write and someone reads our writing, whether it's a note in a lunch box, a letter to a friend, an assignment in school, a journal or a story, dream or factual information we want to tell in writing. What a wonderful world we have in the ability to connect to others through reading.

What is Reading?

bulletVocabulary: Starts at birth.  The children have learned that words have meaning and that meaning is important. Knowing what words mean help in reading and predicting what will happen next in a story.
bulletPhonemic awareness: Children need to be able to distinguish the differences that sounds make. What sound does ball start with?  Not the letter name b, but the sound! 
bulletPhonics:  Knowing what letters make what sounds so that a person can look at print and decode words and read the words.  Just over 50% of the English language is decodable.  The rest we just have to learn.  Those words are referred to as sight words.
bulletFluency: Once children become beginning readers, fluency is very important. There is a correlation between fluency and comprehension.  When a child struggles to read their focus is put into decoding and figuring out the words.  Once they learn those skills, fluency can increase and the understanding of what is being read is easier to make sense of.
bulletComprehension: Understanding what is being read is the key to reading! Like having a conversation and understanding what is said, being able to read and connect with what the author has written is the foundation to comprehension.