The Library Readiness Program has been designed keeping in mind the fact that children are often not able to read and comprehend at grade level. A child’s ability to decode words is a very important part of becoming a fluent reader. Being able to read high frequency/sight words without hesitation helps children better understand what is being read. When a child cannot recognize at least half the words on the page easily, then she spends more time thinking about
individual letters, syllables, and sound combinations, instead of focusing on making sense of and comprehending what she is reading. When she can recognize most of the words on the page, she will begin to explore her capacity to read and learn with greater confidence.
For many children, reading is confined to the classroom, and there is no exposure to reading material other than the textbook, whether at home or at school. Studies after studies have shown that if students are provided with a literacy-rich environment via classroom libraries and reading sessions, sight word instruction, and daily practice through the use of specially designed
activities, there is significant improvement in students’ overall reading and comprehension abilities, and levels of confidence.
When working with low-level readers, an effective approach to teaching reading is to teach a set of words that include Sight words and High-Frequency Words also known as Dolch Words. Sight words are words that cannot be decoded by rules of phonetics and must be memorized by sight. In order to read well, students need to read sight words very quickly. They need to memorize them. High-Frequency Words are words that occur so often in a text that
readers should be able to read them by sight without having to decode them. Knowing these high-frequency words and being able to recognize non-decodable words by sight are extremely important skills for developing reading fluency.
This programme was designed by our partner library, Reading Stars India (Bangalore).