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Everyone knows the importance of learning reading skills early in life. Most children begin formal literacy lessons in kindergarten, but many skills are picked up even earlier. Reading time and bedtime stories, pointing out examples of text in the environment, and educational TV and computer programs help to develop the pre-reading skills needed for young children to progress to reading. What many people are unaware of is that these skills will help to form cognitive pathways that will continue to develop as a child gains aptitude. 

The end game for teachers of literacy is to produce a good reader. Reading fluency is key in this goal, ultimately reading for meaning without getting distracted by the mechanics of it. When kids must stop and decode every word, they are bound to become frustrated and confused.

Learning to read requires a number of skills and is a complex task for every child. Because autism usually goes hand in hand with communication disorders, it can be much more challenging to guide children with any ASD spectrum issues through the steps to literacy.

By the time they reach school age, most children have a good grasp of spoken language. They can give details about familiar objects and are capable of having conversations by automatically combining words to form meaningful sentences. These kids understand that specific sounds represent real objects. The next stage for children is to translate their knowledge of the spoken word to the written form.

Traditionally, accelerated learning has been used to fill gaps with students who are struggling or otherwise falling behind. It would typically be implemented with children who had specific reading exceptionalities, those who started school late,or children who fell behind due to extended absence.Now with a new post-pandemic educational model, we are looking at a much broader range of learning experience.

Reading fluency is one of the later skills that children acquire in their journey to learning to read but is just as essential to future literacy studies. Before a child acquires fluency, they must learn the alphabet, sight words, decoding tactics, and phonemic awareness. Essential Skills online reading programs for kindergarten offer ample practice with these skills in an engaging and appealing format that will encourage kids to learn .

Under “normal” educational conditions, reading intervention programs like the ones developed by Essential Skills to implement reading intervention strategies are mainly focused on students who are struggling in the classroom. Kids that do not keep up with their peers often need to have specific problems identified and ideally remedied. Primary classroom teachers are charged with the care of 20+ young individuals.

The ability to read well is arguably the most complex and essential skill a young child will acquire. Future learning is highly dependent upon a child’s ability to read competently and for content. Elements of reading fluency include strong decoding skills, recognition of sight words and the ability to derive meaning from context. A fluent reader will read aloud with appropriate inflection and timing. They will also retain and understand what they have read. Essential Skills provides some of the best reading programs for elementary schools to help early readers build fluency and strengthen reading skills.

Since the use of sight words is essential for fluency in both written and spoken language, all teachers should have a good grasp on what “sight words” are, and why they are so important.

All educators know the importance of teaching children to read. It is a complicated task consisting of several different abilities. Much of a child’s future learning will depend upon achieving basic linguistic skills in the proper order, and with the necessary support when needed. For struggling readers, acquiring these skills, and receiving sensitive, well-informed scaffolding is even more important.