Understanding the foundational building blocks of teaching children to read are critical to ensuring your child's success. It is important that we do our part as parents to help develop our child's early literacy skills at home, and continue to help them grow and develop as they progress through school.   There have been many reading research studies conducted, and the majority have determined that the five following skills are the foundational building blocks of reading.  Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the  individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words.  Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between the sounds of spoken language (phonemes), and the letters/spellings that represent those sounds in written language (graphemes).  Fluency is the ability to read quickly and accurately. Fluent readers are very skilled at recognizing words automatically. Vocabulary is the definition of words as well as the name for the words we must know in order to listen, speak, read, and write effectively.  Comprehension is the ability to understand what is read.  

Research has shown in multiple studies that it takes mastery of all of the five areas discussed above in order to read effectively. Knowledge of letter-sound relationships and comprehension go hand-in-hand. If children can sound out the words, but don’t understand what they are reading, they’re not really reading.