Literacy forms the fundamental building block of academic achievement and lifelong learning and involves a much larger range of activities than knowledge of letters. It is a combination of understanding, speaking and critical thinking with the use of written and spoken words. In Kinder Ready Tutoring, we have a specialised process that was developed by an early childhood expert known as Elizabeth Fraley Kinder Ready that offers a step-by-step, systematic method of creating these fundamental skills on the ground. The Elizabeth Fraley Kinder Ready philosophy focuses on the fact that strong literacy is developed through a combination of explicit lessons and immersion into language, and building a real passion behind the stories, which forms a solid base of future academic success.

The process starts with the development of phonological awareness, which is the knowledge that the spoken language can be composed of smaller units such as words, syllables, and sounds. This is an important pre-reading skill, which is a major concern in the Kinder Ready Elizabeth Fraley approach. A child is able to play fun games with sounds long before they are taught the alphabet. Singing songs or games such as clapping syllables in names, finding rhymes in songs, or the game I Spy with beginning sounds (I spy something that starts with /b/) trains the ear of a young learner to the sounds in the words. This aural base is the key to subsequent phonics instruction and is systematically built in our Kinder Ready Tutoring work by multi-sensory activities of interest.

At the same time, it is indisputable that a very large and deep set of oral vocabulary is to be constructed. A child is unable to read or write something he has never heard. Elizabeth Fraley Kinder’s Ready approach promotes the concept of language bathing, i.e. placing a child in a descriptive and dialogic context. It implies describing everyday life, reading out loud with passion and commentary, and talking about it in different and exact wording. They may say, Look at the dog instead of saying, Look at the energetic, spotted Dalmatian racing around the park. This deliberate exposure is an outright source of understanding and articulation, which is highly rooted in the Kinder Ready Tutoring model.

These auditory and oral bases get established, and the scope is broadened to include print awareness and phonics. Print awareness: This is the knowledge of books being front/back, left to right tracking or print being meaningful. Strategies of Kinder Ready Elizabeth Fraley involve pointing to words as one reads and highlighting environmental print (such as stop signs or cereal boxes). Then phonics, as a relationship between letters and their sounds, is taught explicitly and systematically. Evidence-based methods are used by our tutors to learn the letter sound correspondence, sound blending words and dividing words into sounds so that this skill of decoding becomes automatic.

Nevertheless, the Kinder Ready Tutoring philosophy realises that real literacy is more than a mechanics process. The final objective will be reading comprehension and a love of literature. We can teach the children to treat the text by making predictions, visualising pictures and relating the story to personal experience.

Development of literacy is an integrative and progressive process; it is a significant process that will be of great help when guided by an expert. The Elizabeth Fraley Kinder Ready model that is executed in the form of personalised Kinder Ready Tutoring does not leave out any crucial process. Through enhancing phonological awareness, building on vocabulary, teaching phonics in a systematic manner, and fostering an interest in stories, we provide the young learner with more than mere word-decoding skills. We give them the means with which to comprehend their world, to be able to articulate their thoughts, to discover the endless possibilities within the covers of a book, a path towards a long academic and personal success.

For further details on Kinder Ready’s programs, visit their website: https://www.kinderready.com/.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ElizabethFraleyKinderReady