Grade school students, in particular K-3 grade students, essentially missed a full year of in-class reading lessons. Schools are considering how to respond to the missing year of reading instruction, or what is now being identified as “unfinished learning”.

As the 2021-22 school year begins, parents are asking a key question:

What can I do to help my child develop the basic skills and strategies in learning to read?

Starting with the Basic Skills in Learning to Read

As adults, we do not remember how we learned to read. Some of us struggled, and today, we all have learned to negotiate our environment by reading at the necessary level. But none of us experience the 15+ months of public-school closures during the most critical years when we learn to read, grades K-3.

This article is the first in an ongoing series specifically about what you, as a parent, teacher or tutor can do to assist the children who are going to need to make up the unfinished reading skills caused by the Covid restrictions.

The following approach has been used successfully to provide a starting point in your child’s journey in learning to read.

The ABC song:

This may sound very basic, but every reader should start with learning to sing the ABC song. The ABC Song represents the names of the letters which we use to identify a letter.

However, just singing the ABC song is not sufficient. It is important that a child associate a specific letter image with each letter name. You can download and print the adjacent page to use as a guide to insure your child is pointing to the specific letters on a page as they sing the ABC song.

We have attached two pages to use in teaching your child the ABC song.
As a first step, sing the ABC song with your child and have your child point to the appropriate upper case and lower letters. In this approach, you are providing your child with the insight that each letter has two representations, an upper case and a lower case. This link shows how we each the ABC song to a small group.

You can repeat this exercise as a warmup to working with your child. The young mind absorbs this type of repetitive practice and will create that first successful step.

You can learn more about the Startup Reading program at https://StartupReading.com