Reading Readiness

          When I was reading chapter one, I found the section about reading readiness to be particularly interesting. When I was in pre-school and kindergarten, I really do not remember much about the process of learning to read or preparation. As a pre-service teacher reading this section, I felt pretty naive when it comes to how to prepare my future students for reading. While I am not sure what grade I will be teaching, I feel like this is something that is vital for all of us to know. It is a large reality that we will most likely have to be flexible our first few years of teaching and will be taking whatever job opportunity comes our way.
          This spurred me to be interested in what kind of activities could be used in the areas of visual discrimination, auditory discrimination, large motor skills, and visual motor skills for getting our future students ready to read. While chapter one briefly discussed this, it really did not go into much depth about them. Below I have listed an article for each of these topics that gives examples of fun activities and ways to incorporate them into the classroom.

Visual Discrimination Examples:

http://www.pinterest.com/moorevision/visual-discrimination/

          - As a preservice teacher I have learned the importance of sharing and receiving ideas from other teachers. This Pinterest page shows a great deal of ideas that can be implemented into the classroom that are not only colorful but very tactile as well.

Auditory Discrimination Examples:

http://www.parent-childservices.com/handouts/activities_to_enhance_auditory_s.htm

          - "Activities to Enhance Auditory Skills in Young Children" article gives many different examples of games, rhyming, and book suggestions that an educator can use with their students.

Large Motor Skill Examples:

https://sites.google.com/site/smallschoolot/information-for-parents/gross-motor-skills

          - This article taught gave me a few ideas that can be used not only as brain breaks in the classroom but overall play opportunities. I like how it highlighted many physical activity examples. Movement helps to make learning fun and joyful as well as influencing students to maintain a healthy lifestyle. 

Visual Motor Skill Examples:

http://therapystreetforkids.com/EyeHandCoord.html

          - "Therapy Street for Kids" gives a long comprehensive list of activities such as finishing a drawing, using toothpicks to build shapes, and stringing beads as ways to help students with their visual motor skills. Many of these do not take many supplies and time and are easy to do.

          After reading these articles I feel a lot more comfortable when it comes to how to prepare our future students learn to read. These activities are great because they are very hands on and fit many different learning styles. It gave me a new perspective on how I will prepare my students for reading. Literacy is something that is so foundational to not only every subject but to prepare our students for life after K-12. These will help our students to build a foundation and start to get them to become life long readers.