Understanding exactly how children learn to read can feel like solving a mystery. Fortunately, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. There are decades of research around reading development that you can use to help your own kids. Collectively, that information is referred to as the science of reading.
Using methods informed by the science of reading is important because they are based on proven knowledge of how kids learn to read. Over the years, some approaches to teaching reading have not been based on the science of reading and thus have not had positive effects on children.
What Is the Science of Reading?
But what is the science of reading? It’s the wide body of scientifically based research that informs how kids are taught to read. As a parent, you definitely don’t need to go deep into all that research, but having a basic understanding of it can help you support your child.
The science of reading has five main areas of focus, or pillars. Each of these pillars plays an important role in how kids learn to read. By developing an awareness of these five pillars, you can support all aspects of your child’s reading development.
The Five Pillars of Reading
The five pillars of reading are key concepts that should be at the core of every effective reading instruction program. These pillars describe key concepts that need to be addressed when teaching kids to read:
- Phonemic Awareness: The ability to identify sounds in spoken words
- Phonics: The ability to decode words by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters
- Fluency: The ability to read in a way that sounds like spoken language
- Vocabulary: The ability to understand and use a variety of words
- Reading Comprehension: The ability to understand text
Five Pillar Activities
As a parent, don’t feel like you need to have a complete understanding of all the components of each pillar. (And you certainly don’t need to develop full lessons on reading instruction!) However, developing an awareness of the pillars can help you include activities that support your child with each pillar.
For instance, as you read with your child, you could do the following activities to help your child develop in each pillar:
- Explore phonemic awareness with a sound scavenger hunt. Give your child a letter sound and have them search around the room for something that starts with that sound. Level up by doing ending sounds.
- Practice phonics by playing letter sound hopscotch. Create a hopscotch grid with letters. Ask your child to hop to the correct letter when a sound is called out.
- To focus on fluency, consider recording your child when they read a short story, then let them listen to the recording while they read the story again. If they’re interested, they can re-record the story.
- To boost vocabulary, help your child create a picture dictionary with illustrations (cut-and-paste or drawn) and definitions for new words.
- To aid comprehension, consider asking “what if” questions about variations on a story, and ask your child what they think would happen, and why. “What if the three bears had been home when Goldilocks came for a visit?”
More to Explore
In addition to the five components of reading, there are other models that help us to understand the science of reading, including Scarborough’s Reading Rope and the Simple View of Reading. But incorporating activities that support the five pillars of reading is a great way to help your child on their reading journey.
Learning about the science of reading can help you to support your child’s reading development. While you don’t need to know everything about teaching reading, having a foundational understanding of the science of reading can help you encourage your child through their reading development journey.
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