Foundation

How Preps Learn To Read And Why You May Hear a Lot Of Sounding Out At Home?

Learning to read is a bit like learning to ride a bike, there are a lot of wobbling before everything clicks. In Prep, reading is not about racing through books or sounding like a newsreader just yet. It’s about making meaning from print, one sound at a time.

To read, children first need to hear and understand the different sounds in spoken language. Then comes the tricky (but exciting!) part, matching those sounds to letters on the page so they can decipher words. Along the way, students also need strong background knowledge and vocabulary so the words they read actually make sense to them. After lots of practice, those words start to become automatic, and that is when fluent, smooth reading really begins.

In the Prep class, we read every day and practise our blending (putting sounds together to read words). At this stage, fluency looks a little different. Right now, our focus is on learning how to read, fluency comes second and will be a big focus next semester.

One of our favourite tools is the whisper phone (yes, it looks a bit funny and yes, this is probably why the students love it). Whisper phones help students hear their own voices as they “keep their voices on” while blending sounds together. For many children, this has been a total game changer and has made blending much easier to understand.

I would love you to have a listen to some of our Preps reading their weekly passages. You will hear careful sounding out, proud smiles, and lots of effort, exactly what strong reading foundations sound like!

Remember: blending is our main goal right now so students become accurate readers. Fluency is coming… just not yet. Good things take time (and a lot of practice!).