Travel to Sofia, Bulgaria with American Kindergarten teacher Launa Hall as she learns how young Bulgarian children learn to read. The centerpiece of every classroom is the Cyrillic alphabet.
Launa Hall’s travels take her to Morocco, a multilingual country that has a complicated language history. With one language used in formal education and others used in daily communication, Launa learns about the challenges and gifts multilingualism presents to developing readers.
Yes, teach print awareness. Let kids see the text you are reading (or writing) and bring their attention to it. Talk about those spaces between words, and don’t hesitate to point to the words that you are reading. But don’t spend a lot of time on fronts and backs of books or how to turn pages or whether numbers and letters are different.
Recent studies indicate that teaching phonemic awareness and the alphabet together generally has a much higher impact on later reading achievement than phonemic awareness teaching alone.
We don’t really know why alphabet knowledge is such a good predictor of reading achievement, but it is. Teaching letter names should be a small part of the mix in phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.
