Early Steps Into Reading

Speaker 1: Welcome to the New World's Reading Initiative. In this video, we'll highlight reading strategies that help your child learn to read unfamiliar words. Specifically, we'll explain how to use magnetic letters or letter tiles to help your child read and spell words.

At school, your child is learning the relationship between letters and sounds, and how sounds go together to make words. You can use magnetic letters or tiles to model how this works. For example, take out the letters A, I, M, S, and T. These are some of the first letters and sounds that children learn.

Next, use the letters to spell the word mat. Show your child how to blend the word together by pointing to each letter as you say its sound. M-A-T says mat. Then say, "Now you try." Then ask your child to spell a new word. Change the word mat to sat. You can prompt your child by saying, "What letter do you need to change?"

Watch this video of a parent using magnetic letters with their child.

Speaker 2: All right, so James, we added letters to our board. Now we've got a lot of letters. So we did, we started with, what word did we start with because of Pete?

James: Cat.

Speaker 2: Pete is a cat, so we spelled cat. Can you spell cat for me, please? Put the cat letters out, please. Let's do these sounds together, ready?

Speaker 2, James (simultaneously): C-A-T, C-A-T, cat.

Speaker 2: Now, can you do the sounds without me? I'll point and you do the sounds.

James: C-A-T, cat.

Speaker 2: Awesome. All right, so what if I wanted to make pat? Pat, can you say pat? What's this word?

James: Pat.

Speaker 2: No, Pete's a cat. A cat is, what do we call it when we have an animal in our house that we take care of? What is that animal?

James: A pet.

Speaker 2: A pet. Here's my tricky challenge. Can you make the word pet? P-E-T, P-E-T.  I thought I could challenge you. Pete, the cat, is a p-e-t. What's the word?

James: Pet.

Speaker 2: Pet, awesome. Okay, so what's this word?

James: M-O-P.

Speaker 2: /o/, /o/, look at my finger, /o/, M-A-P, M-A-P.

James: Map?

Speaker 2: Map. Good job. All right, good work.

Speaker 1: Did you notice how the parent used all lowercase letters of just one color? This helps children pay attention to the shape of the letter rather than the color. And most of the letters children see in books are lowercase. Using lowercase letters will provide your child more opportunities to learn the letter shapes that are most important in reading.

Did you also notice how the parent held out the sounds of some of the letters? This makes the sounds easier to blend. Letters like M and A can all be held out longer, like this. /m/ or /a/. We call these stretch sounds. Other letters can't be held out that way. We call them stop sounds, like T. We cut them off very quickly, like this, /t/.

Let's practice some more stop sounds. Say the sound for B, like this, /b/. Make it sound like you say it at the end of a word, like tab. Helping your child say individual sounds in words and then blend them together will help them learn to read words. Teach your child to hold out sounds that are stretch sounds and cut off sounds that are stop sounds.

Here are a few tips to get started. Use an “I do, we do, you do” sequence. “I do” means you model or show your child how to read the word. “We do” means you do it together. And “you do” means you let your child do it on their own. Start with simple words with short vowels. Mat, tap, sun, sip. Move to longer words with short vowels. Stop, past, frog, step.

Practice words with AR. Star, start, park, car, barn. Try words with a silent E at the end. Save, cake, bike, like. You can also talk to your child's teacher to pick word types that are just right for your child.

Have fun making words with your child.