A parent of a kindergartner asked Jennifer how to help a child who is still learning to read. She answered as both a former principal and a mom.
Where Jennifer Mak stands on early reading
Jennifer Mak, candidate for Torrance Unified School Board, Trustee Area D, believes reading is the foundation for every other subject, and that parents are a child’s first reading partner.
- Know the standards: parents can look up exactly what their child is expected to learn in reading by the end of each grade.
- Read together every night: her advice as a mom whose three children all graduated from Torrance Unified.
- Sounding words out is not enough: children also need to understand what they read.
- Reading unlocks every subject: a child who struggles to read will struggle in math, social studies and science too.
Read together every night. “Every night, I would read to them,” Jennifer says of raising her three children. “And it doesn’t matter how tired I was.” When children build that relationship with books, “because books take you places,” she says, “they will grow up learning and loving to read.”
How to look up your child’s reading standards
Jennifer walks parents through this at her parent workshops. The California Department of Education publishes the reading and writing standards for every grade:
- Go to the California Department of Education website, open Teaching & Learning, and choose English Language Arts. Or open the English Language Arts standards (PDF) directly.
- The standards are grouped into kindergarten through fifth grade, and sixth through twelfth grade.
- Find your child’s grade under Reading Standards for Literature (stories) and Reading Standards for Informational Text (nonfiction). That is what your child is expected to learn and master by the end of the school year.
Phonics and comprehension, in plain terms
- Phonics is matching letters to sounds, so a child can sound out a word.
- Comprehension is understanding what the words mean: who did what, why, and what happens next.
As a principal, Jennifer Mak noticed students who could sound words out beautifully but struggled to answer questions about what they read. Phonics alone was not enough. “If they cannot read, then they will have a hard time accessing math, social studies, science.” Children spend the early grades learning to read. After that, they read to learn.
