Before children are developmentally ready to learn phonics, they should develop their phonemic awareness. According to the National Reading Panel, "Instruction in phonemic awareness (PA) involves teaching children to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken syllables and words." When preschoolers read books with adults, they can answer questions about the smallest sounds they hear in spoken words. Through increasing phonemic awareness, children begin to understand that oral language and written language are the same thing.
Preschool children learn that words have common sounds. For example, a teacher of 4-year-old preschoolers typically spends one week on each letter of the alphabet. Children learn through examples of words that begin with the same letter that the sound is common to many words. When children learn about rhyming sounds through books, songs and games, they prepare for instruction in analogy phonics (using the concepts of onset and rime). They will need to understand how to combine the beginning sound of a word (the onset) and the rest of the word (the rime). In the word "book," the onset is "b" and the rime is "ook."
Another early reading intervention strategy involves developing a child's letter recognition. In modern kindergarten testing, children are tested for which letters they recognize in the alphabet. Through writing, reading, television programming and other exposure to print letters, children can begin to memorize the name of letters and recognize them. They will need to know letters in order to use phonics for decoding words.
The National Reading Panel notes that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work because of the range of skills students possess when they enter kindergarten: "Some children will already know letter-sound correspondences, and some will even be able to decode words, while others will have little or no letter knowledge." Early intervention involves using a variety of reading strategies in the preschool and kindergarten years to reach children at their level. Exposing children to a variety of language skills will give them prior knowledge to draw upon when they begin to decode words.
Another aspect of early reading intervention before kindergarten involves discovery of how books are laid out. Through discussing books with others, children learn concepts such as the front and back covers of the book, the book title, the names of the authors and illustrators and the insight that words are printed or written from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. Toddlers can even learn how to handle books and how to turn them right side up, so they open to the first page.