Understanding the DRA: Unlocking Your Child’s Reading Skills

5 SKILLS REQUIRED TO MASTER READING

Teachers and parents are now lucky enough to have access to a rich selection of evidence-based research on what works in teaching children to read.

As a result, we know that teaching children to read, their ability to learn and become experienced readers, depends on five key skills that we offer you today. Go to the site and find out more information https://argoprep.com/blog/understanding-the-dra-unlocking-your-childs-reading-skills/
From birth
Children’s literacy rates begin to develop long before they go to school. Even the youngest children can begin to be prepared for successful learning to read. Research has identified skills that are important for literacy development:

  • letter knowledge
  • character naming
  • speech management
  • listening comprehension

Childhood
From kindergarten to Grade 3, young readers actively develop all five key skills needed to master reading – from phonemic perception to reading comprehension. Studies have shown that teaching reading during this period requires a certain combination of techniques and strategies. Teachers and parents need to understand how children are learning and need to adapt the teaching methods to the individual abilities of the student.

This is particularly important for children who are having difficulty learning to read.

The basic skills needed by first-time readers:

  • Phonemic perception is the ability to perceive a word as a sequence of phonemes, the smallest units of sound that affect the meaning of words.
  • Phonemes are speech sounds represented by letters of the alphabet.

Adolescence
Despite the fact that the child has already mastered the skills of phonemic perception and decoding, at this age there can often be difficulties in understanding what has been read. In middle and high school, literacy is developed not only in the language field, but also in other disciplines. In order to prepare students for secondary school, teachers and parents need to focus on developing three reading skills: vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The skills needed to understand the meaning of what has been read:

  1. Vocabulary – understanding the words in the text, including the meaning of words depending on the context.
  2. Fluency is the ability to read a text easily and accurately so that attention is focused on understanding what is being read rather than on reading technique.

Basic skills for first-time readers

  1. Phonemic perception is the ability to perceive a word as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are speech sounds represented by letters of the alphabet.
  2. Decoding phonemes is the ability to identify unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back to the sounds they represent, linking them to the word and recognizing its meaning.

The skills needed to understand meaning:

3.Vocabulary – understanding words in a text, including their meaning depending on the context.

4.Fluency – the ability to read a text easily and accurately in such a way that attention is focused on understanding the meaning of what has been read rather than on reading techniques.

5.Understanding – the ability to analyze the meaning of each part of the text, building an understanding of the whole text, and the ability to talk about its meaning and message.

From birth to early childhood.

Literacy rates begin to develop long before a child goes to school. Even the youngest children can begin to be prepared for successful learning to read. Research has identified skills that are important for literacy development. These skills include knowing names and sounds of letters, managing speech sounds, and remembering what was said some time ago.

Childhood

From kindergarten to grade 3, young readers actively develop all five basic reading skills – from phonemic reading to fluency and comprehension. Studies have shown that learning to read during this period requires a certain combination of strategies and techniques. Teachers need to understand how children learn to read and need to adapt teaching methods to the individual student’s abilities, especially for children with reading difficulties.

Adolescence

While the teenager has already mastered the skills of phonemic perception and decoding, at this age it can often be difficult to understand what has been read. In middle and high school, literacy is shaped not only in the language field, but also in other subjects. In order to prepare students for secondary school, teachers must focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.