The Importance of Reading Everyday

Reading is one of my greatest passions and I’ve written about it many times before. I cannot stress enough how important reading is in this age of information. 

There are so many skills involved in reading with understanding. It includes decoding, fluency and comprehension. Within these, there are sub skills of phonics, sight words, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary and others. This is not to make it daunting on parents and teachers but to highlight the importance of reading. Every. Day. 

When children are at the various stages of learning to read, they need to practice it every day. This is the advice I give to parents of the children that I tutor. Make sure that your children are reading every day. If not one book then one chapter and if not event that then one page would do. 

Letter of the Week: y

The letter y is one of the hardest letters to work with as there are not many things that start with y wait until next week when we learn the letter x!) So we've made yoghurt an a yak craft. I ran out of ideas so I've resorted to my foam eyes and mouth stickers.

Book Review: I Will Not Clean My Room

Title : I Will Not Clean My Room

Author: Saharish Arshad

Illustrator: Elsa Estrada

Publisher: Prolance

Ages: 3-5

Musa’s mom asks him to clean his room. Instead, he decides to imagine all the wonderful things he’s going to do in Jannah. Join him as he dreams away and learns that good deeds are really worth the effort.

Cleaning their room is probably the number one thing that children are reluctant to do and I'm sure many can relate to Musa. He is a cheeky little boy who can't stop jumping and sit still long enough to clean his room. 

Phonemic Awareness Activities to Prepare Your Child to Read

Reading starts with the ability to hear sounds in words. This is phonemic awareness. It is being conscious to the fact that all words are produced from different sounds and being able to hear all those sounds in each word. This may sound obvious because we hear sounds when someone speaks. But children who are not phonemically aware cannot hear individual sounds in words because they hear each word as a whole, as a single sound.

In my prekindy classes I teach children phonics. I teach them each sound of the letters of the alphabet. This is to help them to read but I don’t teach them reading yet until they have a phonemic awareness. What is the difference you might ask?