Learning About Print

Did you ever wonder how a child really begins to read?

The first step is learning to match the words on the paper to the words they say. The child:
• Repeats the text.
• Points to the words as they say them
• Uses the pictures to get the meaning
• Learn that there should be the same number of finger points as there are words
• Often “memorize” the story.
• Can be confused by multi-syllable words
Read more below.


One of the first steps in learning to read is learning to look at print. At first children just look at the pictures to understand the story. They listen as an adult reads but their attention is on the picture. The print is just meaningless squiggles to them. But they know how to talk. So we teach them to repeat the text. We start with a simple text that repeats a simple language pattern with one new word/idea on a page. For example in “Dressing Up” a child is dressing in different costumes and saying: I am a cat, I am a Rabbit, and so on. There is a picture of a child dressed as a cat to help them. We teach them to point to each word as they say it. It can take a while to coordinate this. They need to learn to slow down enough so they can tell they are pointing to a word as they say it. This is the first step, they are not reading yet, but learning that each group of letters is a word and their mouth is saying a word. If they say too many words it does not match their pointing. Usually they can see this and know they are not matching the text. The point is to learn the feeling of one word equals one point of the fingers. They may not say the right word, but they can make it match the number of words they see.