It is a universal song, one that we all know. Like most parents, I felt that my son, who now knew his ABC's, was just one step away from becoming a bona fide reader. Boy, was I wrong. But there was so much more for him to learn before he could even begin to decipher the written word. Language is an auditory skill.
Children master the spoken word early on, amassing an astounding vocabulary in the first few years.
When teaching pre-readers the concepts of print, we must teach them things that we seasoned readers take for granted. Books open in a certain direction. Text is read from left to right, top to bottom. Words are separated by spaces. This is quite a lot of information to take in for someone who has previously only experienced language in its spoken form.