Power of Prevention: Top 10 Components to Building a Powerful Preventative Early Literacy Program
Early literacy holds the keys to preventing reading failure for most students. By establishing practices rooted in the science of early literacy, students will be put on a path to become skilled readers and thus orthographic mappers efficiently and engagingly.
Below are the top 10 components to building a powerful preventative Early Literacy program.
When we build coalitions anchored in best practices, students win.
1. Oral Language
Oral language provides the foundations of reading and literacy skills for students. It is defined as a child's understanding and use of spoken language, encompassing major elements such as vocabulary, comprehension, and critical thinking. When students are involved in oral language activities, such as storytelling and discussion, they practice the structures, vocabulary, and sounds of language; this immediately translates into their reading ability through being able to decode words, construct meaning from text, and understand complex ideas. Oral language also hones children's listening skills, critically needed for making sense of and comprehending oral instructions and information received at school. By helping to make oral language the object of instruction, teachers equip students with the very tool they need to draw connections between speech and writing and enhance their proficiency in reading and overall academic success.
2. Teacher Training
The work of setting students up for reading success is critical for early literacy teachers. Training should support educators in helping their students develop phonemic awareness skills while introducing them to the alphabetic principle and then teaching those students to apply the alphabetic principle to decoding and encoding words.
Foundational Literacy
Designed for PK-3 classrooms, our Science of Reading-based solutions provide systematic instruction to ignite orthographic mapping and build strong foundational literacy skills.
3. Acceleration to Phonemic Awareness
Tolman (2018) said instruction should begin with the early phonological awareness skills of syllables, alliteration, and onset-rime, and then move down toward the narrower part of the hourglass, reaching basic phonemic awareness; this is where students segment and blend individual phonemes, or the individual sounds, they hear in words. Phonological awareness is a broad term that encompasses speech sounds at all levels, while phoneme or phonemic awareness is an awareness of individual phonemes.
According to Tolman, students must start with the bigger sound units, but “we want to get them to where it really matters, the individual phoneme level” (Tolman, 2018).
4. Skill-based Assessments and Data
Utilize assessments designed to help educators determine how well early literacy students are acquiring the skills they need to become strong decoders in kindergarten and later grades.
The assessments should enable one-on-one evaluation of basic literacy skills like instructional vocabulary, phonological and phonemic awareness, letter naming, and sound-symbol correspondences.
5. Target Small Group Support
Strategic grouping is an effective tool to use in the classroom, especially with students who have diverse abilities. More time on task offers greater intensity of targeted instruction. Students who struggle often need more time on task and more opportunities to practice with adult supervision. When small group instruction is driven by data, the instruction can be tailored to meet the needs of the students.
Lastly, when small groups are conducted inside the classroom, it is another dose of prevention. How can you use data to group students according to their decoding strengths and weaknesses? Check out our Grouping Matrix.
Complimentary Grouping Matrix
When students are struggling to comprehend what they’re reading, the root cause needs to be identified and fixed. Thus, successful reading intervention often starts with accurate diagnosis and grouping. If you suspect your students have foundational skill weaknesses, like poor decoding skills, the Grouping Matrix is a practical place to start. It helps facilitate differentiated data-driven instruction and reporting.
6. Coordination with K-2 Education
Thirty years ago, Adams (1994) noted that knowledge of the alphabet letters and the phonemes associated with them is a well-known, strong predictor of how a child will succeed in learning to read. Kilpatrick (2016) concurred, explaining that “reading problems can be prevented if all students are trained in letter-sound skills and phonological awareness, starting in kindergarten”.
Acquiring these phonemic awareness and phonics skills can predict later reading success; and even more importantly, not acquiring these key skills can, and does, predict later reading failure. This is why our mission to help students develop into proficient readers is extremely urgent.
7. Family and Home Connection
Directly involving families and caregivers in children’s literacy journey builds a connection between school and home. Encourage these partners by letting them know that they can make a big difference in their child’s success by supporting instruction and building a love for reading. In addition, be clear with families about the goals of the instruction in the classroom.
Example: Our goal by the end of the year is that your child will know the sounds of many letters in the alphabet and will understand and have mastered important underlying skills that will set the stage for them to become strong beginning readers in kindergarten.
Download our Power of Prevention Infographic
8. Inclusive Instruction for Exceptional Learners
We wholeheartedly believe that strong foundational reading skills instruction can help all students become strong, fluent readers.
As an example: “Instruction that provides substantial coverage in the key components of reading—identified by the National Reading Panel (NRP) (NICHD, 2000) as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension—has clear benefits for language-minority students. Focusing on these key components of reading has a positive influence on the literacy development of language-minority students, just as it does for native English speakers” (August & Shanahan, 2006).
9. Alignment to Early Literacy Science of Reading
There is a robust research base on the importance of effective phonemic awareness instruction for developing reading proficiency.
“Phonemic awareness is what allows us to anchor the sounds in a word to the written sequence of letters that represent those sounds” (Kilpatrick, 2015).
Phonological awareness should serve as a runway for helping students achieve an understanding of isolated phonemes. Focusing on sounds is step one of systematic, explicit instruction.
10. High-Quality Instructional Materials
Really Great Reading’s programs for emerging and beginning readers are evidence based, teaching students the key skills they need to become efficient and accurate decoders, which ultimately leads to their success not only in word identification, but also in comprehending what they read.
These key skills include phonological and phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, and phonics knowledge (including decoding and encoding, which stem from a solid understanding of the alphabetic principle).
