Reading Skills

Acquiring good reading skills is enormously significant to a child’s education. Educators are very quick to stress that learning good reading skills is an essential part of a child’s education, as literacy affects every part of a child’s learning, both in school as well as in later years.

If the reading skills are strong, then they can use these literacy skills in other learning areas and better their chances of becoming strong students in subjects other than literacy. If they can read well, they can follow the seams of ideas and learning to their source, no matter the subject.

It’s been found that kids who experience early success in reading are more likely to make sustained progress toward becoming fluent readers—fluency being the desired outcome for reading. But gaining good reading skills is not just about their ability to read a page of writing; it’s about their whole school and working life. In fact, educators have found that when kids are developing reading skills and are reading well, they are more likely to be successful at school, as well as successful in later working life. When school lives only in the distant memory, literacy and its effect on life, still lives on.

Good teachers and educators want kids to read, not just for the sake of reading alone, but rather because it is through acquiring reading skills, and the gains that young readers make in reading, that they will gain the other skills that they need, not just to succeed in reading, but in life as well.

In order for kids to gain good reading skills, so that their reading is successful and can positively affect their learning as a whole, they must make steady progress in the five key areas of reading instruction:

• Phonemic awareness

• Phonics skills

• Fluency in reading

• Vocabulary building

• Text comprehension

And, in order for kids to make steady progress in the five key areas of reading instruction, parents and teachers need to use effective research-based programmes to help kids along the way in their literacy and help them navigate through and acquire the myriad number of skills needed to get them reading well. Any reading programme used to aid kids reading needs to incorporate certain instructional elements that build the reading skills necessary for kids to become fluent readers.

The Reading Eggs programme develops the reading skills necessary to get kids reading well. The Reading Eggs programme:

• Offers early and sustained focus on phonemic awareness and phonics - phonemic awareness skills enable children to listen to speech and understand, as they are listening, that speech is made up of individual sounds that make words, syllables and phonemes. The ability to play with sounds, listen for phonemes and break words into parts are all necessary skills in learning to read.

• Helps kids develop the ability to instantly recall certain words by using a core list of sight words that appear frequently - the ability to instantly recognise and understand sight words helps young readers become more fluent in their reading and also helps them read for meaning.

• Offers a diverse variety of teaching formats and also repeats activities and texts so that kids can build fluency - using a variety of teaching techniques and learning formats keeps the Reading Eggs programme fun and exciting for kids. And at the same time, the use of repetition of lessons helps kids retain what they’ve learned and become fluent readers. Any good reading programme should work toward kids becoming fluent readers.

• Motivates kids to keep reading and learning through a fun reward system - the enjoyment of the task directly relates to a child’s engagement with and time spent on that task. Time spent on a task is a key factor in improving reading success and building literacy.

• Encourages parental involvement - kids don’t learn in a vacuum. Educators are the first to admit that the education of a child is a partnership between the teacher, the parent and the child. Parental involvement in learning improves student learning outcomes and achievement. A good reading programme like Reading Eggs encourages parental involvement, and offers continual feedback to parents about their child’s progress, which makes it easy for parents to be involved.

• Uses vocabulary activities that build understanding - building a larger vocabulary is essential to any reading program of good repute.

• Uses comprehension strategies in it’s lessons that make sure kids are continuing to read for the meaning in a text - understanding text and reading for meaning are the core goals of reading. Decoding a text is not the end goal; readers must also understand what they are reading.

With a reading programme like Reading Eggs, parents and teachers can be confident that their children’s reading will be the main focus of each and every lesson. The Reading Eggs programme combines a strong focus on the five essential elements of reading instruction with a sense of play; it is both educationally rigourous and highly motivating to young learners. Both the educational rigour and the play-based lessons work hand-in-hand to get kids the reading skills they need, so that they are well on their way to becoming life-long learners.

Testimonials

An amazing programme that introduces and supports the essential foundations of reading. Highly interactive and captivating—would buy it again in a flash!

- Sarah Liddicoat, John XXIII Primary School

My class (prep-2) loves the Reading Eggs programme. My students look forward to it every week and their reading skills have improved since we have introduced the programme. Keep up the great work!

- Kathy Norton, Lal Lal Primary School