The Penfield Literacy Hub
Welcome Parents and Caregivers!
Welcome! Learning to read doesn’t happen naturally, it takes explicit instruction and deliberate practice to help a child's brain develop strong literacy skills. Carolyn Strom, an early literacy expert, uses the concept of "Brain City" to explain how this process works.
When a child reads a word, their brain connects three essential regions:
Vision Villages: This is where children recognize the visual shapes of letters.
Sound City: Here, they map those letters to the speech sounds they represent.
Meaning Mountains: Finally, they connect the word to its actual definition and context.
Each time a child practices reading, they build and strengthen neural pathways, essentially paving the "roads" between these areas. As these pathways become faster and more efficient, reading becomes smoother, and comprehension improves.
Strong readers rely on these highly integrated connections between sight, sound, and meaning, just like a bustling city with well-maintained, high-speed roads connecting its neighborhoods.
PCSD Literacy Values
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Access to meaningful, high-quality literacy instruction and texts that function as "windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors" to honor the identities and experiences of self and others.
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Strong evidence-based literacy instruction and to be approached with an asset-based mindset.
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The opportunity to build a lifelong love of reading and writing while connecting literacy to all content areas.
What your child reads now will return to them with dividends for life. From understanding and problem-solving to appreciating cherished stories and great literature, literacy is the door through which all education is accessed. We have created this intentional space so that parents can join us on the journey to quality literacy education but extending classroom learning into the home and community.
The Foundations
When children are learning to read, teachers and specialists look at a few core building blocks. Think of reading like driving a car: you need the engine to work, but you also need to know where you are going. Below is a simple breakdown of how these five pillars work together to build a strong reader.
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Before kids even look at printed letters, they have to hear the individual sounds in spoken words. These tiny units of sound are called phonemes.
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What it means: The ability to notice, think about, and play with individual sounds in spoken words.
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Simple example: If you say the word cat, a child with phonemic awareness can tell you it is made of three separate sounds:
/k/,/a/, and/t/. They can also play games like changing the/k/sound to a/b/sound to make bat.
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If phonemic awareness is about what children hear in the dark, phonics is about what they see on the page. It connects spoken sounds to written language.
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What it means: Understanding the predictable relationship between written letters (or groups of letters) and the spoken sounds they make.
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Simple example: When a child sees the letters sh together on a page, phonics is the rule that tells them these two letters team up to make a single sound like "shh, be quiet.”
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Fluency is what connects knowing individual words to understanding a whole story.
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What it means: The ability to read text accurately, at a good pace, and with the right expression (sounding like they are talking, not like a robot).
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Simple example: A fluent reader reads a sentence smoothly: "The dog ran down the street!" with excitement in their voice. A non-fluent reader might chop it up into slow, exhausting pieces: "The... d-o-g... ran... d-o-w-n... the... s-t-r-e-e-t." Because all their brainpower went into figuring out the words, they often forget what the sentence was even about.
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Once kids start looking at written words, morphology helps them unlock how words are built.
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What it means: Understanding the smallest pieces of language that carry actual meaning, which are called morphemes (like roots, prefixes, and suffixes).
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Simple example: Take the word unhelpful. A child using morphology breaks it down into three meaning clues: un- (not), help (the main action), and -ful (full of). Putting it together, they know it means "not full of help."
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To understand what they read, children need to know what words actually mean when they hear or see them.
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What it means: The collection of words a child understands and can use correctly.
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Simple example: If a child reads a story that says, "The kitten was minuscule," they will get confused unless they have the word minuscule stored in their mental dictionary as a synonym for "very small."
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This is the destination of the entire reading journey. All the other steps exist just to make comprehension happen.
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What it means: Truly understanding, remembering, and making sense of what has been read.
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Simple example: After reading a book about a girl who loses her favorite toy, a child with good comprehension can explain why the girl was sad, predict where the toy might be, and connect the story to a time they lost something of their own.
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Let's dive into some home activities!
Check below for our expanding list of activities you can do at home to strengthen your child’s literacy development! We will be adding to this regularly.
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Let’s go back to C-A-T and B-A T. As your child to identify the speak the first, middle and last sounds of those words.
Now, let’s take it up a notch. Think of the word CHAT. Ask your child to blend CH and AT to make the word CHAT.
Can you think of other words yu would like to use to identify sounds or put sounds together? Go further by doing these activities with words that have four syllables.
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Choose the Right Books: Choose books that are developmentally appropriate and that your child will enjoy, use them for repeated readings. Pick short passages to read over for understanding and talk about the text before, during, and after reading.
Echo Reading: You read a sentence and have your child repeat it. This builds confidence while allowing for correction and focus.
Choral Reading: Read books, passages, and classwork together at the same time.
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If you think about it, everything in our world is made up of words. Expand your child’s vocabulary by spelling everywhere you go. At the supermarket, spell out favorite foods and have your child repeat. While doing laundry spell out words like water temperature(hot, warm, cold). Describe their world, “Your blanket is red, R-E-D.” or “Today it is going to R-A-I-N, rain!”
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Chunking: Difficult words and paragraphs are ok, you just have to take them slowly, After a paragraph or passage of text, pause and review all of the parts of the text to group what your child is reading into chunks of information. This is a great time to review any words that your child may not know.
Summarizing: At the end of a written piece. have your child retell the most important parts of what they read. You can use prompts like, “The Story was mostly about…” or “The most important facts are...”
Bonus Activity: Whether chunking or summarizing, have your child make a diagram or drawing that shows what they have learned and highlights important points.
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Learning is a life-long process, show your child you are in this together by sharing your literacy adventures:
- What is your favorite word?
- What is the first “big” word you were able to pronounce?
- What is your favorite quote from a treasured story or book?
- Talk about a word problem you remember from school.
Books are great gifts!
- Share a book that had personal meaning to you as a child or young adult.
- Introduce genres like biography and memoir by sharing a book about someone who your child may admire.