5 Activities to Engage Your Emergent Readers

When it comes to teaching, reading skills are essential. Reading is the method of absorbing information from every other content area. This is why a solid foundation in reading skills is so important for little ones like your kindergarteners and primary students.

Here are 5 Activities to Engage Your Emergent Readers!

Phonemic Awareness

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is an essential early reading skill for emergent readers. While phonics is more about written letters and sounds, phonemic awareness focuses on oral, spoken word. When teaching phonemic awareness, your students will play with sounds in a variety of ways to manipulate, substitute, and hear isolated sounds. It is also an essential skill to develop before a student can learn to read or improve their reading skills.

Phonemic awareness activities and skills include rhyming, blending, identifying sounds, and more. Read about different phonemic awareness skills and activities to implement in your classroom.

Segmenting and Blending

Blending involves pulling together individual sounds or syllables within words while segmenting involves breaking words down into individual sounds or syllables. Both skills are invaluable to emergent readers!

These skills work hand and hand with phonemic awareness. While phonemic awareness is more about oral formation of sounds, segmenting and blending incorporate both spoken and written activities.

Blending card sets are helpful in introducing these skills and strategies to your readers. When it comes to putting together and pulling apart sounds, incorporate multiple steps and strategies to make sure your learners are getting practice elongating and connecting sounds.

Learn more about using segmenting and blending to teach your readers!

Group Writing Activities

Writing and reading are very much connected in Language Arts. Using group writing activities will get your readers involved and engaged! Start by dictating a class story, having a person of the day recite a sentence, then have your students (as a class) recite and write the sentence.

You may also have students use words with the “sound of the day” to form sentences. It’s just as important to recite the sentence as to write it for your emergent readers. If you don’t want to do this with the whole class, consider making this activity part of small group reading.

Read Aloud with an Emphasis on Reading Comprehension

Do not underestimate the power of reading aloud to all levels of readers!

Sometimes, it’s just fun to read an engaging text aloud to your students, but why not use read alouds as an opportunity to help your emergent readers focus on comprehension skills?

Text Structure

When it comes to nonfiction text, the first thing I want my readers to notice is what the text structure is. This not only helps them follow the pattern of the story; it also leads to the main idea. For young readers, I focus on compare and contrast, chronological order, and cause and effect text structures.

Using graphic organizers to organize ideas in a passage can certainly help your readers follow the pattern and understand ultimately what a text is about.

For fiction, I recommend using read alouds to help your young readers identify story structure. Try a basic plot chart where your students will identify characters, setting (time and place), the main problem, the climax (turning point), and the resolution. Even if you don’t use sophisticated terminology to start, teaching the parts of a narrative story will help your learners understand what happens in given text.

Practice Reading Decodable Texts

Decodable text follows a certain scope and sequence and centers around certain word families. The purpose of decodable text is to give students a lot of practice with specific phonics patterns. Unlike predictable or patterned text, you’re repeating word patterns rather than sentence structure patterns.

Using decodable text is a great way to review word families, introduce new patterns, and have students read aloud in small groups. Learn more about using decodable texts in your reading instruction.

Your emergent readers are counting on you! Providing phonemic awareness, phonics instruction, and focus on reading comprehension for these new readers will leave your readers excited and engaged in reading class! Try these 5 Activities to Engage Your Emergent Readers in your K-2 classroom!