Pre K Reading Curriculum

Reading mastery is pivotal for a child’s success. So how early should you start setting up a child for reading success?

In the home, every effort you make from day one to introduce your children to books is a step in the right direction. And at The Academy of Scholars, we start from day one, too. With our youngest enrolled scholars, we incorporate systematic, research-backed reading instruction through our acclaimed reading program for preschool.

Teaching Reading to Preschoolers: Why it Matters

Reading Underlies Everything

If you don’t learn fractions right on time, your overall education can remain intact. Same with the Krebs Cycle or the 50 states, but reading is different. Reading is the foundation of all other subjects.

Once we value how significantly reading affects our success in other subjects and areas, then we can truly understand why we need to start developing reading skills and strategies as early as Pre-K, if not sooner. If any skill deserves our attention at the youngest ages, it’s reading.

Fluent Reading Doesn’t Just Happen

Fluent reading doesn’t just happen. Starting from infancy to toddlerhood, parents can introduce books to learn basic book-handling skills such as holding the book right side up, turning pages, or looking at the pictures.

Exposing children to books is beneficial in their development. When we read a story, we are also helping them develop other skills such as print awareness, where they can understand that these letters or words on the page carry meaning.

They also develop alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness by being able to recognize some letters of the alphabet and the sounds they produce. They can clap for syllables or identify initial sounds in words.

At The Academy of Scholars, we believe in evidence-based reading instruction starting as young as the Pre-K level because fluent reading does not just happen. We use systematic lessons to ensure we are preparing fluent readers. We also encourage and support parents to work alongside our teachers to make sure we are developing each scholar to their fullest potential.

Opportunity to Develop Proper Foundational Skills

If we solely focus on basic social and emotional skills in pre-K and allow academics to fall by the wayside, we are setting students up for challenges. Without a pre-k reading curriculum, students are left to develop poor habits that will continue throughout their years of schooling.

Some schools mistakenly believe that the trick to getting students to read better is simply to have them read more. But this does little to help struggling readers, except perhaps to allow them to memorize more words. Memorization will hinder an early reader’s progress when developing foundational reading skills.

Research shows that poor phonological and phonemic awareness lie at the heart of reading difficulties. Phonological awareness is a broad skill that allows early readers to recognize and manipulate spoken language such as words, syllables, and the onset (initial phonological unit) and rime (string of letters that follows).

Phonemic awareness is a more advanced skill. It is the ability to discern separate sounds within words. Shifting to focus on developing this awareness is a great step in preventing reading challenges.

At The Academy of Scholars, we can take full advantage of starting early to practice fundamental reading skills. We allow scholars the opportunity to practice their phonological awareness. By focusing on strengthening their sound-related skills they are preparing to then develop their phonemic awareness and manipulate the individual sounds or phonemes in a word. As suggested by the Science of Reading, having strong phonological and phonemic awareness will help readers thrive.

Looking for a Good Pre-K Reading Program in Atlanta?

At The Academy of Scholars, our students hit the ground running with reading skills. Here’s what we teach through our preschool reading curriculum:

Phonological Awareness

Storytime gives early readers the opportunity to understand that sentences are made up of words. Students can then look at the word and identify the initial sound in these words or produce rhyming words. Furthermore, we focus on syllable awareness or being able to recognize that words can be broken down into syllables.

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is key to helping students sound out new words correctly. Students are taught that each letter has a sound (or multiple sounds). Once students grasp this, they practice manipulating sounds within words. Students may be asked to isolate beginning sounds in words, blend sounds together to create words, or even substitute a sound in a given word in order to create a new word.

Phonics

In addition to being able to break words into sounds, students need to master the letter/sound correspondence, which is what phonics is all about. Our pre-K phonics curriculum works in tandem with phonemic awareness to help kids make sense of new words and make what they see on paper match what they say.

Fluency

Fluency also plays a role in developing strong readers. Fluency is built through repeated exposure and practice. Students are given the opportunity to practice those foundational reading skills through multiple activities. This repeated exposure through different means, whether it be hands-on or technology-driven activities, is helping the student build fluency.

Reading Immersion

Exposure to literature helps speed reading mastery along. We read aloud to our students, allowing them to pick up on expression and hear fluent reading. We teach kids how to process books in a focused way, with an understanding of characters, plot, and setting, all of which are essential for preschool reading comprehension.

Reading is a means to learning, so while we focus on systematic reading instruction, we give students the tools to derive meaning from what they’ve read (or heard).

What Makes The Academy of Scholars’ Preschool Reading Program so Great?

As you look at different schools’ pre-K reading curriculums in Decatur and Atlanta, you’ll find a wide variety of instruction methods. Here’s what sets us apart from the competition:

Engaging and Meaningful Lessons

When students are first introduced to formal instruction, the focus should be on making the experience enjoyable while also ensuring that they gain something valuable from each lesson.

We make sure that students are engaged by differentiating instruction so the context being taught is easily grasped and mastered. We also create lessons using text or activities that students can easily connect with, which makes the learning process more enjoyable.

We understand that when students are starting their academic career, it is imperative that we structure lessons in a captivating way. Keeping in mind the different types of learners, we ensure that there is an appropriate activity for all learners. Through centers, students are able to engage with the material and practice skills in a multitude of ways.

Science of Reading-based Curriculum

Through the years, we have been able to acquire some great research (The Science of Reading). It focuses on how children learn to read and what occurs in the brain when they are developing their reading skills.

The comprehensive study is composed of research completed by specialists in several fields such as linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and education. This research provides evidence-based insights into how reading should be taught, particularly for early readers. It suggests that reading should be introduced at an early age, even before formal reading lessons begin in school.

The Science of Reading has confirmed that a reader with strong phonemic awareness skills is likely to become a successful reader.

Here at the Academy of Scholars, we value an evidence-based approach to developing our early readers’ foundational skills. Therefore, we create all lessons based on the Science of Reading findings, focusing first on phonological and phonemic awareness.

Teacher Training

Teachers are given all the resources and training necessary to teach in alignment with our preschool/pre-K phonics curriculum. We want to ensure that all teachers are creating evidence-based lessons, so we give them the tools needed to achieve that.

We provide explicit training for each grade level, clearly outlining the expectations and milestones students are expected to achieve. Teachers also learn from one another when they meet as grade-level teams. This creates an opportunity for teachers to brainstorm and develop engaging lessons that align with the principles of the Science of Reading.

Consistency

Because all of our teachers are experts in the same pre-K through sixth-grade curriculum, students enjoy a seamless progression from grade to grade and class to class. This is not an arbitrary situation where teachers march to the beat of their own drum. We’re all on the same page when it comes to reading instruction, and that ensures an iterative experience, with students building and improving on each new skill.

Well-balanced Program

Pre-K at The Academy of Scholars is an experience like no other! Our program will develop each student intellectually, morally, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and socially. Focusing on intellectual development, more specifically reading, we provide instruction in foundational reading skills and build upon each new skill as students progress.

We target pre-K reading from an evidence-based approach. Students must first master oral language and phonological awareness before we expose them to print and phonemic awareness. We are focused on the foundation of reading because research shows that a strong foundation builds strong readers.