Kindergarten Reading Curriculum

At The Academy of Scholars, we don’t take reading lightly. We’ve devoted countless resources to making sure every student gets the tools they need to love and excel at reading.

Can You Really Teach Kindergartners to Read?

Whether your child has already been exposed to reading through our Pre-K curriculum or they are just experiencing formal education for the first time, we are confident in saying that we can teach kindergartners to read.

If we set the expectation bar low, students will only meet us there. A healthy child at the kindergarten level is developmentally prepared to learn to read. So, join us in raising the bar by teaching them to read in kindergarten.

It is imperative to focus on the building blocks necessary to become a reader rather than jumping right into reading. If a child does not know letter sounds for “a” and “t,” it would be impossible to read the word “at.”

Simply knowing the sound (phoneme) without being able to connect it to the letter (grapheme) could also hinder a child from reading. This is why we go back to the beginning and reteach or introduce the basics before we begin reading.

All reading lessons are based on evidence. Teachers dedicate time to gather evidence and data by assessing students and understanding what they already know while also gauging where lessons should start. By doing so, students are equipped with the skills needed to read by the end of kindergarten.

What Makes a Good Kindergarten Reading Program?

The best reading programs are based on the Science of Reading, which explicitly teaches all the skills necessary to develop successful readers. These skills should include:

Opportunity to Review/Reinforce Foundational Skills

Have you heard the phrase “Use it or lose it”? Well, over the summer many students do not dedicate the same amount of time to reading or academic skills as they do during the school year. This causes the “summer slide,” a phenomenon where students lose some knowledge and skills gained during the previous school year over summer break.

Although parents are often encouraged to provide educational activities to help prevent the summer slide, some have fewer opportunities for educational enrichment during the summer. Therefore, it is a teacher’s responsibility to assess prior knowledge before starting to teach reading.

A good kindergarten reading program keeps the summer slide in mind. Time is dedicated to thoroughly assessing prior knowledge. The focus then shifts to reviewing or reinforcing foundational reading skills. Early learners need multiple opportunities to engage prior knowledge and skills. Reinforcing previously acquired skills will strengthen the foundation that successful readers are built upon.

Phonemic Awareness

Research shows that strong phonemic awareness is a key indicator of early reading success. Educators should constantly work on strengthening phonemic awareness. These phonemic awareness activities could be short in length as long as they are frequent. Our goal is continuous exposure.

At the kindergarten level, we teach basic phonemes and have students practice manipulating them within words (adding, subtracting, or substituting sounds). Phonemic awareness is essential to being able to sound out unfamiliar words rather than just guessing at them. That’s why we prioritize it from the youngest grades.

Phonics

In addition to teaching phonemic awareness, we offer a robust phonics curriculum for our kindergarten students. Whereas phonemic awareness deals with speech sounds, phonics deals with letter-sound correspondence.

Phonics helps kids understand digraphs like /ch/ and /th/. It also explains rules, such as why having an E at the end of “same” causes the A to say its name. With daily practice on phonics, the rules of the English language become second nature—not something students have to work to figure out with each new word.

Comprehension

Being able to sound out words is only part of the equation. Students need to gather meaning from text and connect it to real life. Some students decode words with ease but have trouble comprehending them, so we practice building comprehension skills as part of our kindergarten reading curriculum here in Decatur.

Not all reading materials are interesting to kindergartners or even relevant to their lives, so we have invested heavily in an engaging library of materials that young students can relate to and connect with.

Building background knowledge and asking questions are crucial in developing comprehension skills. Once we choose texts that students can connect with, we have initiated the first step in building background knowledge. If a student connects to a text prior to reading it, they are more likely to have some background knowledge, which helps foster that initial connection to the text.

As additional assurance, we ask questions as part of our kindergarten reading comprehension curriculum. This helps students make additional connections. They are also given the opportunity to ask questions and clarify any doubts prior to reading the text.

These minor, preemptive steps help them focus solely on comprehending the text. We mention “foundational skills” a significant number of times because they are essential in producing well-rounded proficient readers.

Fluency

While reading rate is important, we begin by working on accuracy and prosody (patterns of intonation) at the kindergarten level. When a student is starting to read, we don’t focus on how many words per minute they read because it could hurt their confidence or diminish their accuracy.

Instead, at the kindergarten reading level, we focus on accuracy, making sure that the words are read correctly. This also leads them to gain a better understanding of the text they are reading.

In addition to focusing on reading accuracy, we also work on their prosody, which is crucial in reflecting comprehension and natural reading flow.

Why Start Teaching Reading so Early?

According to an American Educator article, “About 20% of elementary school students nationwide have serious problems learning to read; at least another 20% are at risk for not meeting grade-level expectations.”

The article also explains that African American and Hispanic students and those living in poverty fall behind at even higher rates, with 60 to 70% showing weak reading skills. When the stakes are this high, we don’t have the luxury of waiting to teach reading.

Using statistics to drive us, we carefully plan meaningful lessons to help students master reading fundamentals as young as kindergarten. Kindergarten is the right time to start because it will prevent them from:

• Picking up bad habits that could hinder their reading progress (such as trying to guess at words rather than strategically sounding them out).
• Losing self-confidence because they believe they don’t read as well as their peers.
• Losing their love of reading.
• Falling into the “spiral” and losing ground in comprehension, fluency, etc.

Teaching kindergarteners reading skills and strategies from the start gives them time to learn and internalize critical skills at a comfortable pace.

What Does a “Day in the Life” Look Like for Our Reading Students?

At The Academy of Scholars, our kindergarten reading program includes all of the best practices when teaching reading. We always gauge students’ abilities and use it as our baseline to begin planning lessons.

Students are able to practice phonemic awareness through whole group, small group, or independent activities. An all-time favorite activity is the hands-on centers, where students can engage in self-correcting activities to reinforce their phonemic awareness.

These activities help students build confidence in their abilities because they can correct their own mistakes without direct teacher intervention. These activities are also beneficial because they foster independent learning while reinforcing reading skills.

In our daily schedule, there is time allotted specifically for teaching kindergarteners phonics. Students are given explicit instruction on the phonics pattern being taught. This includes seeing and practicing what it looks like in different words, texts, and tenses. The phonics instruction is differentiated and customized to ensure that all students are building upon prior knowledge and there are no gaps in their learning.

Our reading instruction also dedicates time to master comprehension, fluency, and writing. These skills are further developed in our media studies course. Once a week, students are able to visit our school library, and our media specialist guides lessons to reinforce their reading skills.

Are The Academy of Scholars Teachers Trained to Teach Kindergarten Phonics?

We are aware that some educators may not have had proper training on how to teach reading in accordance with the Science of Reading findings. The Academy of Scholars solves this problem by training our teachers in our research-backed reading curriculum. Thanks to our intensive training, our teachers know how to:

• Explicitly teach common phonics patterns
• Teach specific reading and writing skills on a daily basis
• Help students develop increasing autonomy so they can sound out new words

If you’re looking for a kindergarten reading curriculum in Atlanta or Decatur that will help your child master reading from a young age, come see us at The Academy of Scholars. We know that today’s readers are tomorrow’s leaders, and we start early to give our students the tools they need to excel in reading.