In the All About Reading Pre-reading program, your child will learn five very important pre-reading skills: Print Awareness, Phonological Awareness, Letter Knowledge, Listening Comprehension, and Motivation to Read. We call them the Big Five Skills. These skills lay the foundation for understanding written language and, as research has confirmed, are essential to preparing your child to learn to read, and ensuring that your child will learn to read easily and well.
The program uses a carefully scripted set of special games, little craft projects, rhyming activities, and read-alouds to teach the Big Five Skills. The Ziggy Zebra puppet also plays an important role in many of the activities—by "helping" Ziggy learn and "correcting his mistakes," your child will not only learn the necessary skills, but will also feel empowered and successful because he has been able to help Ziggy learn, too.
Your child will feel like he's just "playing school" and having fun—but he'll actually be learning these essential pre-reading skills:
Print Awareness teaches children how print is used. They learn that the characters on a page are letters, that letters create words, and that words have meaning and are related to spoken language. Your child will also learn what text is supposed to look like and that it is read left to right and top to bottom.
Letter Knowledge teaches children all the letters of the alphabet in capital and lowercase forms, as well as the names and sounds of each letter. Children will also learn to recognize each letter individually, out of order, and embedded in text, and that letters create words and words allow us to communicate.
Phonological Awareness teaches children to hear and identify the different sounds in words. They will discover that they can create new words by manipulating and changing sounds, and that each word has a distinct meaning. And they will learn that sounds create syllables, syllables create words, and words create sentences.
Listening Comprehension teaches children to listen carefully to the words they hear so they can understand what they are hearing, remember it, and relate to it in some way.
Motivation to Read teaches children that reading is a fun and engaging activity, creating in them the eagerness and willingness to read.
The All About Reading Pre-reading Teacher's Manual contains 78 step-by-step lessons that are easy to follow and fun to teach!
Softcover: 201 pages
ISBN: 978-1-935197-18-8
Product Dimensions 8.5 x 11 inches