How to Help Preschoolers Develop Pre-Writing Skills

phonicsorg on August 23, 2024

How to Help Preschoolers Develop Pre-Writing Skills

KW: how can you help preschool children develop pre-writing skills

Along with early reading concepts, one of the most important skills a child learns in preschool is early writing. Pre-writing skills are the set of abilities a child first needs to begin the process of learning how to write. These skills involve fine motor skills, sensorimotor skills, and visual processing, among other important abilities children typically develop in their early years.

Pre-writing skills are essential for children and can even solidify their reading skills. Because handwriting is so important in school, learning these basic skills early acts as a stepping stone for your child’s future academic success.

As a parent or educator, it’s important to understand how writing develops so that you can identify milestones as well as spot any developmental delays early on. So, how can you help preschool children develop pre-writing skills? Keep reading to learn more.

The Skills That Help Children Learn How to Write

While learning how to write might seem like a simple and straightforward process, there are actually several developmental skills that go into it. Learning to hold a writing utensil properly is a challenge for many children!

Pre-writing skills are the skills kids need before they begin successfully learning how to write. Examples of these foundational skills include:

Hand-eye coordination
Motor control
Motor planning
Wrist stability
Visual perception
Drawing
Copying
Posture
Grip

It’s important to remember that writing—just like reading—is a rather sophisticated skill. It’s nearly impossible for humans to pick up on these skills naturally or with ease. We must be directly taught, beginning with the most basic skills and working our way up. Therefore, forcing a child to transition into writing can crush their drive in literacy development. Every child learns at their own pace, so take it slow and allow them to get familiar with writing.

Developing Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills are a person’s ability to coordinate and use smaller muscles and joints in their fingers, hands, and wrists to perform controlled tasks. These skills begin to develop early in a child’s life and then strengthen gradually over time. During the pre-writing phase, children need fine motor skills to begin holding a pencil correctly and navigating their wrists and hands smoothly.

By three years old, many kids can use fine motor skills to:

Copy basic shapes with fingers or markers
Use eating utensils to feed themselves
Stack items with precision
Put together puzzles on their own
Dress themselves with little help
Scribble and color in coloring books with ease

To help a child develop fine motor skills for writing, start by identifying their hand preference. Children typically show signs of a dominant hand around age two or three, so pay attention to which hand they use to reach for toys, eat with a spoon or fork, throw a ball, or do other daily activities. Their dominant hand is likely the hand they’ll begin writing with.

Pencil Grasp Development

Children need to learn how to hold a writing utensil correctly. This is one of the most important parts of tying in fine motor skills with writing development. Therefore, when your child begins practicing pre-writing skills, it’s advisable to start them off with regular-sized utensils so they can play around with gripping and grasping in order to write.

While some educators used to start young children off with thicker pencils, this can make it more difficult to learn proper pencil grasp. Imagine how hard it would be to write with a large carrot! Focus on showing your child how to use the dynamic tripod grasp, which is ideal for preventing pain and discomfort once they learn how to write. If a child still has difficulty after kindergarten, pencil grips or help from an occupational therapist can help.

Supporting Visual Processing and Memory

Pre-writing involves sight and memory, as well. Many children develop visual processing skills through play and natural development. Kids need to be able to see, interpret, process, remember, and coordinate the letters and shapes they are presented with. This is true not only for writing and reading but for about 75% of all learning!

It is important to have your child’s eyes checked regularly to ensure they can see well. You can also support kids’ visual processing and hand-eye coordination by playing games and engaging them in physical activities that require sight. For example, playing a game of “catch” is a common option. You can also play games that “cross the midline,” which means being aware of the invisible line that runs between the two halves and hemispheres of the body—so reaching across the body right and left.

Encouraging Letter Recognition and Letter Formation

Letter recognition is the ability to identify alphabetical letters by their shape and name. Before being able to write, children need to know how to recognize, copy, and remember the shapes of letters. This is a fundamental skill for not only writing but also reading.

Hands-on shapes and modeling clay can be used to create or build letters and play with their general shapes. When it comes to printing, explicitly teach children how to form letters properly. Check and make sure that you’re familiar with proper letter formation advised by occupational therapists and commonly used by most educators. Proper letter formation should eventually become automatic so your child can save cognitive room for spelling and later expressing ideas!

Fostering Creativity and Critical Thinking

Problem-solving and creative thinking are two other skills that contribute to pre-writing. The stronger a child’s problem-solving and curiosity, the more likely they are to digest and solidify new information when it comes time to learn writing. Similarly, when a child is encouraged to pursue their creativity, they’re able to express themselves in new ways when practicing pre-writing and early writing concepts.

Instead of giving kids exercises that require one-way responses, ask them for their opinions and observations. For example, instead of telling children to write the ABCs, ask them how they would write the alphabet if they invented it. In this way, they can show off their artistic side and learn to make decisions independent of what they’ve been exposed to. It can be a helpful gateway into teaching letters and writing!

The Role of Pre-Writing in Phonics

Phonics breaks down the English language into speech sounds and correlates those sounds with alphabetical letters. When children learn phonics, they’ll eventually write down sounds they hear in order to spell in addition to sounding out what they read.

A 2022 study shows that when children are introduced to phonics early, it helps them understand the link between letters and phonemes (speech sounds). For example, when a child that understands sees the letter “b” at the beginning of a word, they know it’s a /b/ sound. This is the foundation for learning to spell, which is an important pre-writing skill.

Phonics education lays the foundation for strong literacy skills in children. Kids’ brains are like sponges that absorb new information. So when you introduce them to phonics early, they’ll learn important literacy skills that’ll make it easier for them to read and write.

5 Findings That Prove Words Are Remembered in Phonological Memory

phonicsorg on June 27, 2024

To read fluently, the brain pulls from a large sight word vocabulary that we’ve built over time. Sight words make the reading process easy, automatic, and meaningful as we string together words we’re already familiar with. But how are sight words remembered? Furthermore, how does the brain store, process, and retrieve so many words from memory as we read?

The fascinating answer has much to do with phonological memory. There have been many discoveries that prove how sight words are stored and what this reveals about reading development. In this article, we look at some of the most interesting findings that prove how our word-reading memory functions—and why it’s not based on visual memorization.

How is Reading Fluency Developed?

Dr. David Kilpatrick, a renowned researcher in the science of reading, provides compelling evidence that sight words are not memorized as whole visual units as previously thought among educators. Instead, words are stored in our phonological memory, the part of the brain that processes speech sounds.

In his book Equipped for Reading Success, Dr. Kilpatrick explains the process of how words are remembered. In short, for children to become strong readers, they must develop three things.

Alphabetic Principle — The understanding that alphabetical letters (and letter combinations) represent individual sounds in spoken language.
Phonic Decoding Skills — The ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound relationships and effectively sound out (decode) unfamiliar words, letter by letter.
Orthographic Mapping — The process of repeatedly connecting spoken words to the spelling of their written words, resulting in permanent word memory over time. Orthographic mapping relies on two things:
1. Letter-Sound Proficiency
2. Phonemic Proficiency

As Dr. Kilpatrick explains, “Oral words are made up of sequences of oral sounds. Written words are strings of letters designed to represent those sounds. A word’s pronunciation (phonology) and meaning (semantics) are connected in memory with the word’s spelling (orthography), so when the printed word is seen, the pronunciation and meaning are instantly accessed. There is no guessing or sounding out the word. The word just effortlessly pops into your mind.” (Equipped for Reading Success, p. 38-39).

What is Phonological Memory?

Phonological memory refers to the part of our brain’s memory system that stores and retrieves speech sounds.

It plays an important role in reading development because to read words, a reader must know how to match visual letters with the sounds they represent. Then, they must decode multiple speech sounds—each pulled from phonological memory—and blend them together to reveal the whole word. Their knowledge of the whole word is also stored in phonological memory.

The letter sounds, pronunciation, syntax, and meaning of words all come from this phonological memory system, enabling beginner readers to sound out and comprehend words in print. Then, through orthographic mapping, this memory system stores the now-familiar words. Readers can easily recognize mapped words which then builds reading fluency. This is the “phonological filing system” as Dr. Kilpatrick calls it.

Proof That Words Are Remembered in Phonological Memory

In research on reading development, there’s plenty of evidence that word recognition is not based on visual memory alone. Rather, words are stored in phonological memory—the part of memory that relates to verbal language. In his book, Equipped for Reading Success, Kilpatrick illustrates examples of this evidence. Here is a summary of the key findings.

1. We Can Read Different Fonts and Typestyles

As literate individuals, we can read texts in various fonts and styles that we’ve never encountered before. This is one of the simplest facts that demonstrate word-reading memorization is not visual.

For example, we can read:

Mixed-case words (sPeLLiNg ThAt’s LiKe tHiS)
Different fonts (serif, sans-serif, bold, skinny, bubbly, squiggly, etc.)
Capital letters (ALL CAPS LIKE THIS) and lowercase letters (all lowercase like this) in various contexts
Different handwritings—from a doctor’s sloppy scribbles to a stranger’s unique print
Cursive and formal scripts

There’s no possible way a reader has been previously exposed to every style of text they will ever read. If words within an unfamiliar or hard-to-read piece of print have not been saved to visual memory, how can the reader decode them with ease? We know that most words are not stored in memory as whole visual units. No matter what font we read, our brains pull from phonological memory to decode new (and even barely legible) print styles.

2. We Know That Visual Memory Differs from Word Memory

The field of cognitive science has discovered that visual memory and word memory operate differently in the brain. The average literate adult can verbally identify words in print faster than they’re able to name visual objects in pictures. For example, if you compare the speed at which adults would say words for everyday objects (“house,” “phone,” “car,” etc.) based on reading the word aloud or identifying the object in a picture, the word recall speed is faster in reading.

Children with reading disorders have shown similar scores to proficient readers on visual memory tests, despite having significantly lower scores in word memory. If reading was dependent on visual memory for word recall, why would children score the same for visual tests but fail word-reading tests? This rules out a visual-based word memory.

Even more surprising is the finding that deaf individuals—despite achieving normal visual memory scores and having no visual impairments—typically struggle to obtain expected reading proficiency for their age. It’s estimated that one in three deaf students graduates high school with a reading level at or below third grade (Center on Literacy and Deafness). This hints at the importance of verbal (phonological) language in the development of word-reading memory.

3. We Correlate Sight Words With Phonemic Awareness

Sight words include any word that a reader is familiar with and can recognize by sight, with no need for decoding. There is a lot of correlation shown between phonemic awareness and sight words, whereas there is very little correlation between visual memory and sight words.

4. We Forget Words in Working Memory, Not Phonological Memory

Think about a time when you were trying to explain something in a conversation but you forgot the specific word to describe something. You know the meaning of the word and the point you’re trying to make, and yet you can’t remember the actual word for what you’re saying. You might stammer, “What’s the word…? It’s on the tip of my tongue!” but your mind goes blank.

This brief memory lapse does not happen when reading text that contains words we already know. For example, say you’re trying to remember the word “simmer” when verbally explaining the process of cooking something on the stovetop. You can’t remember the word that means not quite a boil but maintains cooking at a high temperature. Alternatively, if you were to read a recipe that stated, “Simmer on low for 20 minutes,” you’d have no problem recalling the word or what it means.

Why would we forget words in working memory but not in phonological memory? Word recall is not set in working memory. It has to do with phonology and the process of orthographic mapping.

5. We Have a Limited Capacity for Visual Memory

Although it’s been previously assumed that whole-word memorization is a required process for reading, our brains cannot store so many visualizations—at least not accurately. Research on visual memory has found that human memory is incapable of storing more than 30,000 to 60,000 words for retrieval.

When trying to remember a new address or phone number, what do you do? Most likely, you read the numbers and then repeat the string of digits either out loud or silently in your head. Quick, grab a piece of paper or your cell phone—write it down before you forget! If we could imprint text onto visual memory, this process would be much easier. We wouldn’t need to repeat the digits until we could offload them from our working memory.

Consider the fact that all of the above examples reveal that we use “visual input” to process text initially. However, we do not use visual storage to “memorize” the visuals we see. Instead, we rely on our knowledge of phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and sight words.

Understanding Phonological Memory: Help Children Learn to Read

Why does all of this matter? Knowing the role and function of phonological memory in reading development is crucial for effective literacy instruction. By understanding how words are decoded, remembered, processed, and retrieved, you can prioritize the necessary and effective phonics strategies when helping children learn to read. It’s highly advised you avoid whole-word memorization strategies–such as memorizing large lists of high-frequency words or “analyzing” the outer shape of a word–because these are common practices that are ineffective.

Learn more about evidence-based phonics instruction at Phonics.org where we explain reading science with practical applications for families and teachers.

Sight Words vs. High-Frequency Words

phonicsorg on May 6, 2024

During phonics instruction, children learn to sound out or “decode” words. With enough practice, decoding turns into sight word recognition. Sight words are defined as any word that can be recognized instantaneously at first sight, without the need to decode it.

High-frequency words are defined as the most commonly occurring words found in texts and books. Some high-frequency words are regular, meaning they follow common phonics patterns.

Irregular words, however, do not follow common phonics patterns. An example of an irregular high-frequency word is ‘of,’ in which the <f> makes a /v/ sound—which is not a regular phonics pattern.

The two terms “sight words” and “high-frequency words” are often used incorrectly or interchangeably, which can lead to confusion. It can also lead to ineffective phonics instruction methods.

What is the real difference between sight words and high-frequency words? Let’s clarify each term so you can master your approach to proper instruction. Keep reading to learn the difference and the relationship between sight words and high-frequency words in children’s literacy development.

How Does a Word Become a Sight Word?

As children develop sight word recognition, their reading fluency and comprehension improve. Students learn to recognize sight words through the process of orthographic mapping.

Children learn letter-sound correspondences.
Readers use their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to decode new words.
Each time a student decodes the same word, their brain “maps” the written word to the spoken word and its meaning.
Repeated orthographic mapping of the same word reinforces that word in the child’s memory.
After so many repetitions, the brain instantly maps words when reading texts.

Once new words are committed to a child’s memory, they can focus their cognitive efforts on comprehending the words rather than stumbling over frequently encountered ones.

What are High-Frequency Words?

As the name implies, high-frequency words are words that appear frequently in written texts. Students encounter them repeatedly as their reading abilities progress. In fact, 100 high-frequency words make up 50% of the words we read and write in English!

As students encounter frequently-appearing words in their reading materials, their familiarity with the words’ phonetic patterns supports their fluency and accurate reading. Eventually, high-frequency words will become sight words that students can recognize automatically. This is an important goal and milestone in phonics instruction.

How Do Kids Learn to Read Irregular High-Frequency Words

Some irregularly-spelled words appear frequently in texts. These words can be tricky for children to “sound out” using basic phonics rules on their own. Teachers must take a different approach.

While there is some debate in reading research about how children learn to read irregular words, there are generally two approaches used in instruction.

The “Heart Word Magic” approach focuses on decoding letter sounds, while explicitly pointing out the irregular sound parts that should be memorized “by heart.”
The Paired Associate Learning approach emphasizes word memorization. It pairs the visual word with the pronunciation of that word. However, this is not useful for all words as rote memorization can become a challenge or even a disadvantage for learners.

Are Sight Words and High-Frequency Words the Same Thing?

By knowing the difference and the relationship between sight words and high-frequency words, teachers ensure well-rounded phonics instruction. The importance of explicit, systematic phonics instruction cannot be overstated in the context of reading development, no matter which type of words students are learning to decode. Extensive research demonstrates that a strong foundation in systematic phonics is crucial to long-term reading success.

Phonics Activities to Master High-Frequency Words as Sight Words

What are some effective ways teachers and parents can introduce (and practice) high-frequency words when their child is learning to read? Take a few of these pointers.

Irregular High-Frequency Words

Teaching irregular words that occur frequently should not be the primary focus of reading instruction. Knowing these words well does play a role in developing fluency and efficiency. Word-reading instruction blends explicit phonics practice with repeated exposure to build automatic word recognition over time.

Effective strategies for explaining irregular high-frequency words include:

Word Builders: Use movable letter tiles or Elkonin boxes to let students sound out new words and explain the irregular portion of the word.
Decodable Books: Having students read decodable texts that contain targeted high-frequency words helps with repetition, encouraging them to apply their phonics knowledge while decoding new words.
Break Down Irregular Words: Introduce an irregular word to students (such as “said”). Have them underline the sounds they know, and circle the sounds they don’t know. In this case, /ai/ is likely unfamiliar as the word ‘said’ sounds like it has an /e/ in the middle. Students underline /s/ and /d/ but circle /ai/, and the teacher explains this irregular word in full.

Regular High-Frequency Words

High-frequency words should be taught primarily through explicit, systematic phonics instruction. As students encounter these common words in their reading materials, they should be encouraged to apply their phonics knowledge to decode and analyze the words’ patterns.

Incorporate high-frequency word study into phonics lessons by having students blend the sounds and practice reading and spelling the words in context. Provide decodable texts that contain the high-frequency words being studied, allowing students to reinforce their phonics skills while gaining repeated exposure to these words.

Help Kids Learn to Read Through Phonics

Providing a strong foundation in phonics is crucial for raising skilled and confident readers. This evidence-based approach aligns with the science of reading and sets children on the path to long-term learning and success.

To learn more about implementing accurate, research-based phonics methods in your classroom or home, explore the wealth of resources available at Phonics.org.