In the All About Reading Pre-reading program, your child will learn five very important pre-reading skills: Print Awareness, Phonological Awareness, Letter Knowledge, Listening Comprehension, and Motivation to Read. We call them the Big Five Skills. These skills lay the foundation for understanding written language and, as research has confirmed, are essential to preparing your child to learn to read, and ensuring that your child will learn to read easily and well.
The program uses a carefully scripted set of special games, little craft projects, rhyming activities, and read-alouds to teach the Big Five Skills. The Ziggy Zebra puppet also plays an important role in many of the activities by "helping" Ziggy learn and "correcting his mistakes," your child will not only learn the necessary skills, but will also feel empowered and successful because he has been able to help Ziggy learn, too.
Your child will feel like he's just "playing school" and having fun, but he'll actually be learning these essential pre-reading skills:
Print Awareness teaches children how print is used. They learn that the characters on a page are letters, that letters create words, and that words have meaning and are related to spoken language. Your child will also learn what text is supposed to look like and that it is read left to right and top to bottom.
Letter Knowledge teaches children all the letters of the alphabet in capital and lowercase forms, as well as the names and sounds of each letter. Children will also learn to recognize each letter individually, out of order, and embedded in text, and that letters create words and words allow us to communicate.
Phonological Awareness teaches children to hear and identify the different sounds in words. They will discover that they can create new words by manipulating and changing sounds, and that each word has a distinct meaning. And they will learn that sounds create syllables, syllables create words, and words create sentences.
Listening Comprehension teaches children to listen carefully to the words they hear so they can understand what they are hearing, remember it, and relate to it in some way.
Motivation to Read teaches children that reading is a fun and engaging activity, creating in them the eagerness and willingness to read.
The All About Reading Pre-reading Teacher's Manual contains 78 step-by-step lessons that are easy to follow and fun to teach!
The All About Reading Pre-Reading program covers letter recognition (capitals first, then lowercase) and letter sounds (consonants and short vowels). The author has identified the Big Five Skills which are foundational to the educational mission of this course. Print Awareness (text carries meaning and is related to spoken language specific tips in lessons), Phonological Awareness (the ability to hear and identify parts of words), Letter Knowledge (recognizing the letters and knowing the letter names and sounds), Listening Comprehension (precursor to reading comprehension), and Motivation to Read (no parenthetical clarification needed). We're obviously talking more than simple ABCs here, aren't we? And Ziggy is eager to illustrate the difference.
Ziggy is a personable, strokeable, fun-loving young zebra puppet with a tendency to say the wrong word, drop sounds from words, and distract your child away with game-playing (wink-wink). Lessons are written around Ziggy's participation. I suppose you could do "work arounds" and cover the same material, but Ziggy will win your child's heart and you'll be off and learning before you even know it. In addition to Ziggy's games and antics, lessons include an introduction to the letter or sound, poem-reading from either the Zigzag Zebra or the Lizard Lou book, completion of a craft sheet, additional activities (chosen from a list in the appendix), games, and the read aloud time. The two hardbound books Zigzag Zebra and Lizard Lou (each a collection of poems for letters or letter sounds; also available as optional audio-books) are used daily (one or the other) to introduce or reinforce sounds.
The Pre-reading Activity Book (My Book of Letters) contains the craft sheets for the lessons; each of which have supplies needed and instructions on the back. These perforated activity sheets include coloring, dot-to-dots, mini craft projects involving adding construction or tissue paper accents or various types of sparklies, games like "Circle the Letter t", sound match-ups, and hidden pictures. Common craft materials needed include crayons, markers, scissors, glue, tape, and a miscellaneous assortment of optional craft materials.
My older boys have loved the older ages for All about reading and my youngest is showing an interest in reading so Might as well go with the tried and true!
I lost my other copy.
My 2 year old is very interested in learning and I thought this would be a good structured educational daily activity.