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Print concept is the understanding of the written components that allow for reading to be preformed correctly. Print concepts help children understand how books and printed texts work.

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Print concept is taught so that students understand that print carries meaning

(Gunning, 2019).

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By age 4, most children can use their auditory skills to recognize rhymes. By age 5, children can recognize rhymes and syllables. By age 5.5, children are starting to develop awareness in language, recognizing different phonemes, segmenting sounds, and beginning to blend words. By age 6, they can delete phonemes from words and blend phonemes together to make longer words. 

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Most students (75%) enter kindergarten with proficient phonemic awareness skills.

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Letter naming, or the alphabetic principle, states that all letters represent speech sounds (Gunning, 2019). Ideally, individuals should be able to identify the symbols- uppercase and lowercase- and then state their names. This allows information to be written down and read. 

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The identification of each letter as an uppercase or lowercase symbol.

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Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness and involves identifying and manipulating individual sounds in words (Talbot, 2020). Phonemic awareness is essential for success in learning to read and spell.

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Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes (letter sounds).

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One of the best ways to help develop print concept is to demonstrate it to students and to ask them guiding questions.

Examples:

Pointing to the words you are reading during read aloud to show that you are reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

Allow students to help you turn the page when you have finished reading the text on that page.

Ask students to point to the author of the book before beginning to read aloud.

A silly way to help students understand could be to try reading the book bottom-to-top. They will realize that the story does not make sense when the text is read this way.

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Introduction to print concept: As early as possible

Children can be read to from extremely early ages to start to develop these skills. Even allowing a 5 month old to play with a book can start to develop print concepts.

Mastery of print concept: End of Kindergarten (AZED, 2016)

Going into 1st grade, students should understand concepts such as:

Reading occurs left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

Sentences are made up of groups of words.

The difference between a word and a letter.

Spaces separate words.

Spoken words are represented in written language, through specific sequences of letters.

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One way to multi-sensory approach that can be used to differentiate print concepts for ELL and/or dyslexic students is to create pointers. This is engaging because they can decorate them how they wish. Students can then use these pointers to follow along with words as they are being read. They can also use these pointers to identify the different print concepts, such as pointing to the first word of the page, or pointing to the author's name on the book cover. By pointing to words as they are being read, students are showing that they understand where one word starts and the next begins, which is an important skill in print concept.

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Phonological awareness is the ability to understand sounds of a word. This ability is used by hearing, recognizing, and manipulating the words and the skills you use are rhyming, alliteration, and syllable breaking (Coleman, 2025).

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Phonological awareness is understanding that sounds come together to make words and words come together to make sentences.

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1. In order to teach phonological awareness, students have to understand all the parts that fall under the umbrella. Each part helps break down the idea of phonological awareness, and when students understand the little parts, they are able to see phonological awareness as a whole (Gunning, 2019). This means that instructing phonological awareness is integrated within every lesson, but it may not be the objective until later on. 2. The question game: "How many words are in the sentence?" "Does this word rhyme with this word?" (Reading Rockets, n.d.) - this idea of questions also goes along with Heggerty 

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This is an integral part of learning language because it puts everything all together (Gunning, 2019)

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1. Guess-the-Word-Game: taking a word that is not put together and seeing if students are able to blend the word back together and identify what it says. By having a set of pictures, you as the teacher, will say a word (ex. caaaaaaaat or c/a/t - either say it elongated or segmented) then have students point to the picture they believe you are saying (Chard & Dickson, n.d.). 2. Individual Heggerty: rather than participating in this activity as a whole, take students individually to see if they can rhyme, segment, add/subtract, identify the onset and rime, etc.

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Putting the whole "umbrella" together to assess if students understand phonological awareness

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Children should start to develop a sense of phonological awareness at the age of 3 then as they continue to grow, they should be able to master the skill by the age of 8 (this would be around 2nd grade).

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This starts prior to being in school and should be mastered by the end of 2nd grade.

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Students should master the alphabetic principle by the end of their kindergarten year. Per Arizona State Standard K.RF.1.f, students in Kindergarten should master recognizing, identifying, and naming all upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet (26 letters, each having lower and uppercase). This is a foundational skill (Arizona Department of Education, 2025). However, many students come into school with the idea that letters make up words so they may copy shapes they see or place shapes to create what looks like a word made from letters. This can begin anytime around 3 years (Gunning, 2019). 

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Identifying and naming uppercase letters only

Identifying and naming lowercase letters only

Identifying and naming uppercase and lowercase together

Writing the alphabet

Tying the common sounds to most letters

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1. Play letter games/phoneme substitution games: If your students can’t write letters yet, have them tell you what letters they think would make up a word, or use Play-Doh, magnetic letters, blocks, or an electronic device to make words. For instance, auditory cues are in play when children are asked to clap the number of syllables they hear in a spoken word. (Let’s clap the sounds in cat!). 2. Use multisensory like auditory, visual, touch, and movement to representations of letters and sounds to teach phonemic awareness (Wise, 2022): Use blocks or poker chips to represent each sound in a word (write each sound or letter on each chip and see how you can manipulate the chips to change the words or letters).

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Hands-on and interactive strategies, like letter games and multisensory activities, help students develop phonemic awareness by connecting sounds to letters through movement, touch, and auditory cues.

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Determining whether to teach uppercase letters or lowercase letters first is a constant debate in education. Truly, this is dependent on the background of your students and testing which they may begin picking up sooner (Gunning, 2019). Overall, students will learn best by explicit teaching of these letters and their names. Additionally, it has been found that learning a letter each day is beneficial. This is because the letter will be reviewed in 26 days when the cycle repeats itself in instruction allowing for each letter to be reviewed multiple times in a year (Gunning, 2019)

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Teach distinctive features of the letters (shapes, open or closed, curves, etc. ) Do not compare 'b' and 'd' early on as this may cause confusion (Gunning, 2019).

Teach the letters in isolation, focusing on one at a time. Often, it is smart to teach consonants first as their sounds are typically simple (Texas Education Agency, 2025).

Provide ample opportunities for children to play with letter manipulatives, alphabet books, and/or blocks (Texas Education Agency, 2025).

Use songs, rhymes, and tracing letters to help learn letter names and shapes. Jack Hartmann videos are great for this.

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evidence based instruction letter naming

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There are many assessments to help assess students' progress or proficiency in their letter-naming skills. Fluency in the alphabetic principle is determined by 100 percent accuracy on an assessment (Reading Universe, n.d.). These assessments provide a student copy and a teacher copy of rows with letters in random order (most often a mix between uppercase and lowercase). These assessments are great as they do not take much time for students to complete one-on-one with the adult assessing them. This assessment should occur multiple times a year to continuously collect data and see the child's development. A timer will begin, and the student will start naming the letters seen in the rows. As the student goes about the assessment, the administer checks off correct letters and notes mistakes on a separate piece of paper. 

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Reading Universe Organization provides a free letter naming assessment PDF to view. They also provide a video as an example of how to administer the assessment to the student.

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For the ELLs and Dyslexic students, the best way to differentiate for them is through manipulation and visual representation. When they write in the sand or build with playdough, students can engineer the words and then repeat the sounds they make afterwards. 

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Manipulation and visual representation go hand in hand

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With the right strategies, you can help your students with dyslexia improve their phonemic awareness. A multi-sensory approach is an effective teaching technique for children with dyslexia (Victoria, 2023). This approach involves using multiple senses to engage students in learning. For example, you can use visual aids like pictures, letter tiles, or a whiteboard to help students see and connect sounds to letters. You can also use auditory cues like songs, chants, or rhymes to help students remember sounds and syllables. 

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A multi-sensory approach is an effective teaching technique for children with dyslexia.

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Differentiation can benefit all students while still heavily benefiting the students who specifically need it such as ELL students or a student with dyslexia. One method that applies to the alphabetic principle is providing the student with a personal alphabet strip in addition to a class one being displayed (Gunning, 2019). The students can use this as a tool to refer to, jog their memory of the ABC song to help in identification, and look at it as they begin to be familiarized with the shapes of each letter. For independent practice and support, students can make use of the colorful letter manipulatives and letter puzzles (many can be made to state the letter name as students correctly place their pieces). These students will benefit from any opportunity to point out the letter names even in daily items like a cereal box, markers, or their names (Gunning, 2019)! Implementing songs with visuals is another great tool for these students. These songs are repetitive, allowing ample practice. As they sing along, trace letters, or create letters by using large body movements the children connect the letter name with the letter symbol. As mentioned in prior posts, Jack Hartmann videos are an awesome tool for multi-sensory approaches to teaching letter recognition. 

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Music, movement, and letter manipulatives provide great opportunities to create a multi-sensory experience for students learning letter names.

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One-on-one assessment with students is most effective to establish how well they understand print concepts. In this one-on-one assessment, the teacher should ask questions such as, "Can you show me" :

A word?

A letter?

The front of the book?

The back of the book?

The title?

Where to start reading?

How to hold the book?

How many words are in this sentence?

The end of the sentence?

(Reading Rocket, n.d.)

This can also be done as a less formal assessment, such as asking these questions to the whole class during read aloud time. This informal assessment can give the teacher a better idea of how the class as a whole is understanding print concepts, while asking the questions one-on-one will better assess individual students.

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Some phonological and phonemic awareness screening tools: Rosner’s Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (TAAS) and Foundations of Early Literacy Assessment (FELA). When assessing children’s phonological awareness skills it is useful to understand the ages at which 80-90 percent of typical students have achieved a particular phonological skill so we can determine if our students are making progress towards meeting their skill. For example, at age 5 they should be able to answer "Tell me a word that rhymes with car." Then at age 6 they should be able to answer "Say cowboy. Say it again, but don't say cow." This shows they are making progress.

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Screening or assessing phonemic awareness should be carried out early in the first year of school and monitored throughout.