The Science of Reading has emerged as a buzzword in early childhood and elementary learning spaces lately, although it has been around for quite a while. It’s basically a framework for teaching literacy skills step by step, and guess what — a lot of Montessori pre-reading activities already incorporate Science of Reading strategies!
The first step is building phonological awareness. This just means that we are working on the ability recognize and manipulate parts of sentences and words — orally, before introducing letter symbols. Some pre-reading activities that align with both the Science of Reading & Montessori to work on building phonological awareness:
Counting Words
Take a sentence or the title of a book and count the individual words in it.
Compound Words
Taking two words and putting them together to make a new word!
Syllable Counting
Break those words down just a bit further to recognize the different syllables that make up one word. You can do this by clapping each syllable or by placing your hand below your chin and counting how many times your hand dips down when you say the word.
Rhyming Words
Listening for ending syllables and matching them as rhymes.
Next, we build phonemic awareness. This means that we are breaking words down further into individual sounds, at first orally, and later with the letters as symbols to represent the sounds we hear. Some pre-reading activities that align with both the Science of Reading & Montessori to work on building phonemic awareness:
Beginning, Ending, and Middle Sounds in Isolation
Beginning sounds are the easiest to isolate, so begin there. Then listen for ending sounds. The last sound to listen for is the middle sound, as that is the most difficult sound to isolate.
After working on sound isolation orally, add the letter symbols.
Phoneme Manipulation: Addition, Deletion, and Substitution
Play around with the sounds within words to make them into new words! Start with adding a sound to the beginning of a word. Then try removing (deleting) a sound from a word. Finally, replace one sound with another sound (substitution).
After working on phoneme manipulation orally, try doing it with the movable alphabet.
Sound Segmentation
Break words down further into the individual sounds that you hear in the word. Count out the sounds by patting a surface or counting on your fingers with each sound.
After doing this orally, try counting out each individual sound in written CVC words.
Adding Symbols with Guidelines
Take the sound segmentation and assign letters to each sound. Use a hint like a color-coded mat to indicate what color the letter will be.
These pre-reading activities are essential for preparing for word building and decoding in the beginning stages of reading, so don’t skip them!
You can find printable versions of many of these activities in my Etsy shop.
To learn more about Montessori Language, check out my E-Courses.
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