Just after 8 a.m., the kindergartners at KIPP Baltimore were having a dance party.

A YouTube video guided them through the alphabet, pairing letters and words with dance moves. “A” got alligator and a hand chomp. “D” stood for dancing dinosaur, paired with the Thriller dance. The kids’ favorite was “R,” which had them and their paraeducator Irika Ford jamming out with an air guitar for “rockstar roll.”

“Do your best every day! Tell me what sounds the letters make!” the kids sang along.

This is what the “science of reading” looks like — learning letter sounds, “sounding out” words, and pairing repetition with joy. As of this school year, all Maryland schools must use these brain science-backed principles in reading instruction as the state seeks to boost literacy rates.

“It seems so basic in some ways. ‘Put these three sounds together, blend this word, put these four sounds together.’ But the more practice, the better,” said Mary Gittens, the director of literacy at KIPP, a charter school in West Baltimore. “The more practice outside of school, inside of school, the stronger you’ll get.”

At school, kids pick up skills parents can reinforce intuitively and formally at home. Here’s how.

Focus on sounding it out, not guessing

After their dance break, Tamara Long’s kindergarten students grab boards and markers before returning to their spots on the rug. There, they write out words like ball, egg and dress as their teacher reads them.

Long points to her lips to show them how she pronounces the letter sounds. She gets ahead of potential frustration by warning kids about double letters.

“Being able to identify the individual sounds in letters, in words, is the way that you will learn to read,” Gittens said. “I’m not using pictures to help guess the word, figure out the word. That‘s not a skill, even if it is accurate.”

Kids grow from identifying individual letters to more complicated skills like consonant digraphs — sounds like “sh” and “ck” — and stringing together sentences.

When KIPP students are tested on reading three times a year, they show off how they “sound it out” by reading nonsense words. They also demonstrate phoneme segmentation fluency, or how they break words apart into distinct sounds, as Long did when showing a student how to put the “r” in “dress.”

But some words can’t be pronounced by sounding it out. “Ball,” for example, can be difficult both because of the double letter and because there’s no “o,” even if kids hear it. Kids simply have to learn those words by heart. Reading books with your child that are beyond their skill level can expose them to new vocabulary, said Eryn Lessard, KIPP’s director of development and external affairs.

Parents can help their kids nail down letter sounds anytime, said Simone Gibson, a literacy expert and associate professor at Morgan State University. She used her kids’ love of french fries to plant early seeds for letter and sound recognition, calling attention to “m” as the first letter in “McDonald’s” — which is also modeled by the chain’s famous golden arches.

Read ‘decodable’ books

Down the hall, the kids in Danielle White’s kindergarten class are spread out across the room with books in front of them, tracking each word with their finger as they sound out the text.

The books are decodable, meaning they have words students can break down and blend, as well as tricky words they’re learning by heart. Gittens said that‘s a departure from books kids used to get handed, which taught letter sounds but also required word guessing.

White’s students read the story several times in big and small groups, then answer questions about plot points and the central characters.

That explicit instruction is exactly what kids need, Gibson said. Parents are often told to read to their kids more. While that can get kids excited about reading and build vocabulary, Gibson stressed they need to be a part of it.

“When you learn to read, you learn to unlock puzzles that are words that make sentences that are ideas,” Gibson said. “Kids having that understanding is a really powerful tool.”

Gittens recommended that parents seek out stories that are decodable.

“There’s this kind of assumption that only teachers can teach reading,” Gibson said. “Parents, whoever is raising those kids, those are the first reading teachers.”

Practice in everyday life

Gibson said parents are often bestowing literacy on their kids without realizing it. Even just turning up a song on the radio and emphasizing how words rhyme as you sing along is a way of teaching phonemic awareness.

“Nobody comes to us [educators] as a blank slate. Literacy is all around us, in every home. I don’t care what your home looks like,” said Gibson, who is also the assistant director for literacy at the National Center for the Elimination of Education Disparities at Morgan. “All our kids are coming to us literate in something.”

Kindergarten reading instruction assumes that “every student is starting at the same place” even if kids come in with varying skills, Gittens said.

“It‘s just a wonderful opportunity to be able to close any gaps immediately, if they exist,” said Gittens, who used to teach kindergarten.

In KIPP kindergarten classrooms, posters show kids how their mouths and tongue positions should look when pronouncing each letter. Just talking and learning to express themselves at home can set kids up for reading success, Gittens said.

Maryland wants all kids reading fluently by third grade. What gets hard as kids advance beyond kindergarten, Gibson said, is the emotional baggage they may accumulate if their classmates become fluent readers while they struggle. Part of that stems from the misguided belief, she added, that reading is tied to being smart. Kids and their parents need to let go of of that assumption.

“Grown folks, most of us don’t remember the process itself, but reading is the hardest,” Gibson said. “Reading is not about intelligence as much as it is exposure and lots of intentional practice.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.