Educating Young Children Volume 1 - Winter 2026 | Page 59

Key Takeaways for Educators of Young Children

Here are five key takeaways for educators about research-based literacy instruction:

› Supporting children’ s oral language and knowledge building is critical. Young children learn new words when they learn new things. Provide children with experiences and read alouds that expose them to new ideas about the world, and teach children language to talk about these new ideas.

› Read to and with children a lot, and invite them to explore a broad range of books and other types of texts in your setting. Different children get excited about reading different books and different types of text.

› Play with sounds in words with a focus on phonemic blending and segmentation. Phonemes matter because they’ re the sounds that we represent with letters when we read and write.

› Teach sound-letter relationships systematically and explicitly. Children need opportunities to connect phonemes with the letter( or combination of letters) that make each sound and, in turn, to apply this information as they read and write.

› Encourage and make time for young children’ s writing. Writing and reading are mutually supportive activities. Encourage children to use what they know about letters and sounds( estimated spelling) to share their ideas and stories.