By Deanna Stecker, M.A., Applied Educational Psychology: Reading Specialist

Of the many challenges facing education today, teaching children to read remains at the forefront of both research and controversy. Children must be prepared to fully participate in a society that demands high levels of literacy or risk being denied a successful future. Recent data released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that nearly 40 percent of fourth graders across the country cannot read at a basic level. Many of those children likely entered school with weak early literacy skills and were, therefore, behind from the start. Weak early literacy skills put children at a disadvantage right from the beginning and, as the data indicate, can have devastating effects on both self-esteem and long-term academic success. While any child can have difficulties developing adequate skills, inadequate preparation for learning to read is particularly common among children from poor homes, with limited English proficiency or whose parents report difficulty learning to read.

Get Ready to Read! was launched by the National Center for Learning Disabilities to ensure that all preschool children will have the skills they need to be ready to learn to read when they enter kindergarten. Fortunately, recent research has taught us a great deal about how children learn to read and indicates that many reading problems can be prevented by providing children with adequate preparation for literacy instruction while they are three and four years old. The mission of Get Ready to Read! is to fulfill this important goal by:

• educating early-care providers about how to engage in behaviors that support early literacy development and to recognize behaviors that place children at risk for reading failure;
• providing a reliable, easy-to-use, research-based screening tool to determine four-year-olds' early literacy skills and familiarity with pre-reading concepts;
• providing parents, early-childhood professionals and caregivers with information about how to build young children's pre-reading skills based on the most current research;
• encouraging development and continued progress, both of children's literacy skills and early childhood educators' understanding of literacy development.

The Get Ready to Read! screening tool is not a test. It is an educational tool that gives parents and early-childhood professionals the opportunity to sit down individually with a child and get a "snapshot" of the child's reading readiness and literacy skill development. Once the parent or professional has a sense of where the child is along the road to getting ready to read, the program will provide easy access to activities and information that will allow him or her to meet that child's needs within the home or a developmentally appropriate early childhood setting. It is commonly acknowledged that classroom practice can be as much as ten years behind educational research. A goal of Get Ready to Read! is to overcome this gap and to bring reliable, current research in early literacy and language into early childhood classrooms.

The Three Domains of Early Literacy Skills
The Get Ready to Read! screening tool is structured around three domains of early literacy development: linguistic awareness, emergent writing and print knowledge. There are several items in the screening tool that address skills within each of the domains.

Linguistic Awareness
Linguistic awareness is an important listening skill that refers to a child's understanding of how language works. Four-year-olds who are developing linguistic awareness will begin to:

• recognize rhymes,
• learn to match words that rhyme or begin with the same letter,
• become aware that sentences that they hear are made up of separate words,
• develop a varied vocabulary based on real-life experiences and discussions with caring adults,
• understand that the words they hear are made up of syllables and distinct sounds.

Emergent Writing
Developing readers and writers need many opportunities to express themselves on paper. Emergent writing refers to the child's:

• ability to distinguish between drawing and writing;
• progression from random scribbling, to purposeful scribbling and drawing, to early attempts at copying and making letters that convey meaning;
• developing the ability to print his or her name;
• early attempts at spelling and message writing.

Print Knowledge
Print knowledge refers to a child's understanding of books, printed letters and words. In order to become a successful reader, a child must develop the understanding that print carries a message and that people read the text rather than the pictures. A child must grasp the nature and purposes of books and other printed material and be aware of the conventions of how to read a book. Specifically, print awareness includes these skills:

• understanding the nature and purposes of books, printed words and letters;
• the ability to distinguish letters and words from other printed material;
• understanding left-to-right progression of text;
• recognizing environmental print, or the print that children see in their neighborhoods, home and school;
• understanding that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the words on a page and what the reader says;
• accurately naming the letters of the alphabet, beginning with the child's own name and progressing to the entire alphabet.

Working in partnership with organizations whose focus is the well-being of young children and their families, Get Ready to Read! has already reached thousands of children and early-childhood professionals across the country.

For Further Information
National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Washington, D.C.

Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

Whitehurst, G.J. & Lonigan, C.J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development, 69, 848-872.