It’s very important for you to understand the stages of early writing skills. You want to know what you should expect of your child and how their skills should develop. First, your child will be able to hear, and subsequently write, initial letter sounds. This is the first letter in the word. Your child will start off by writing usually just the first letter in the word. Next, your child will start to hear medial…
Read More »In starting to support your child’s writing skills, it is important to engage your child in the purposeful nature of writing. Writing exists to express ourselves, to share stories, to let others in on our inner world. We want children to understand that, just as the books they read contain stories, they are able to express themselves through stories as well. In the early stages of writing, we allow children to express themselves through both…
Read More »In the following series of blog posts, I will demonstrate a series of activities to get your child started on the writing process. The following curriculum is adapted from Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study for Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum. In teaching a class of kindergartners, half of whom had special needs in some capacity, I adapted the curriculum to meet each student’s individual needs. If you’re working with your child on beginning writing strategies,…
Read More »As I mentioned in blog two, it is best to start with your child on short vowel sounds, which are the standard vowel sounds you hear in the middle of each of the following words: cat bed pig sock cup These short vowel sounds are predictable, and in all CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words the vowel in the middle (known as the medial vowel) makes…
Read More »We are excited to announce that Boston Tutoring Services is releasing a new ISEE and SSAT test prep book for the ISEE and SSAT tests, as well as the Boston Latin Exam. We have thoroughly researched all of the current test preparation strategies for ISEE and SSAT content and developed proprietary materials that enhance the current approaches and make them more effective for instruction. Tutors have been fully retrained using the new materials. An exclusive benefit of…
Read More »It is important to keep in mind that reading comprehension is as vital a skill for children to learn as reading fluency. If your child can read words but then loses the meaning as they move across a page, reading will remain an arduous task and will not seem fun. Your child needs to be able to retain the information on a page and keep track of the story, and this can be difficult at…
Read More »As your child gets into kindergarten and then first grade, sight words will become a big part of their literacy skill set. Sight words are also known as high-frequency words, and are words that must be learned by repeated exposure because they usually cannot be decoded or sounded out. You can start introducing sight words to children early, and you’ve probably noticed that your child can “read” certain words already just by seeing them frequently,…
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It is important to reinforce the skill of rhyming with your child as you move through their early learning-to-read process. You can work on rhyming before they have any letter recognition at all, just using objects around your home and asking whether they recognize if two things rhyme (for example, “Does hat rhyme with cat?”). Repeat the words several times to help encourage the recognition of the rhyme (“Cat, hat, they sound alike, right?”). This…
Read More »After your child is comfortable with at least half of their letter-sound relationships, you can move on to decoding and blending. Decoding is recognizing that each letter makes a specific sound, and blending is putting those sounds together to read the word. This is the process of reading that you are familiar with, also known as “sounding it out.” To decode a word, start with something simple, like mat. Point to the first letter and…
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