Without these 7 skills, children will never (never, never, never) be amazingly strong readers. (WHAT!) That is quite a claim to make! But I stand behind it wholeheartedly.

I know firsthand. I have seen students who rock at reading, and children who struggle every single day.

Learning letters and their sounds are important for children. But (and that is a very, very big BUT) there are 7 other areas that are EVEN MORE important for young children to learn.

In my BRAND NEW book (!!!!), Beyond the Alphabet: Play into Reading Readiness I address how to teach children letters through play, what order to introduce letters for best results, and even how to teach children to read! But first, I share with you the 7 essential skills all children must learn.

Since you are here, you likely know how we like to do things in this space. And this book is no exception.

In this book the Teacher-me describes the skill we are practicing, the Fun-Mama-me outlines many playful and fun ways to help your child learn this skill, and the Quiet-Time-Mama-Me suggests Quiet Bins for each skill so your little one can consolidate that learning.

To make things even easier, all quiet bin supplies and playful activities involve household items you certainly have on hand.

I wanted to share with you these 7 skills we will be teaching your young child (ideally 3-6 years old) to get him or her ready to rock at school and excel in reading. All of these skills are auditory – which means they involve hearing the sounds, not knowing the letter names (we are moving Beyond the Alphabet – get it?!)

1. Rhyming: Rhyming involves hearing rhymes (in nursery rhymes, silly songs or Dr. Seuss books for example), recognizing rhymes (“Does cat rhyme with bat?”), and finally, making rhymes independently (“The dog jumped over the log!”).
2. Word Awareness: Word awareness is understanding where a word begins and ends. This can be trickier than you might realize. Consider this: be is a word all on it’s own, as is the word begin, but be true is two words. Tricky!
3. Syllable Awareness: Syllable awareness is the ability to hear how many sounds are in a single word.
4. Sound Identification: Identifying the sounds in a word is an important skill for future reading and writing. Sound identification starts with identifying the first sound in a word, then the last sound, and finally, the middle sound, which is the most difficult.
5. Sound Segmenting: Sound segmenting is about p-u-l-l-i-n-g words apart to hear each little sound.
6. Sound Blending: Sound blending is the flip side of sound segmenting. It involves pushing sounds in a word together and blending sounds to hear (or read) full words.
7. Deleting Sounds: Deleting sounds involves removing the first or last sound in a word. For example, saying the word cat, then saying the word again but deleting the first sound, which would result in at.

Of course this all sounds quite dry – but the activities and quiet bins in this book are SO MUCH FUN! Children will adore playing through this book with you – and I promise you will adore the end result too.

Children who know reading is fun and who are ready to tackle all that school throws their way! So let’s get these little ones ready to ROCK at reading! It’s truly as easy as 7 steps!

Get the eBook for $12

Or get the Print Book for $20 from (aff) Amazon.com or Amazon.ca

Thank you so much for reading friends and for letting me share with you my excitement. I hope you consider this book — I really believe you will LOVE it!

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