Look for these signs of progress in your pre-reader.

As the 4 year olds arrive at the Mountain View Parent Nursery School, they pick out their nametags and hand them to teacher Betsy Nikolchev to fasten. “Great job finding your name, Elaine,” Nikolchev says. “How did you know that says Elaine?” “Because it starts with the letter ‘E,'” she answers. “What other letters are in your name?” the teacher asks. “E-l-a-i-n-e.” “Wow. I’m so proud of you,” Nikolchev says.

Long before children can read books they need to master key skills that will help them make sense of all those black squiggles on the page. The National Institute for Literacy has identified a number of building blocks that prepare children for reading. The key components of reading readiness include:

Familiarity with print and books: It’s important for your child to know that people read words, not pictures, and that the words she sees in print are related to the words she speaks and hears. She also needs to know how books work — that you begin with the cover right-side up and move from front to back, one page at a time.

Reading milestones:

• Recognizing print in everyday life, on cereal boxes, street signs, and more
• Knowing you can use print for many different purposes, from stories to grocery lists
• Holding a book, turning the pages, and pretending to read
• Following the series of events in some stories
• Asking questions and making comments that show she understands what you read to her

Letter recognition: The more letters your child is able to instantly recognize and name by the time he starts kindergarten, the quicker he’ll be able to focus his attention on other tasks such as the sounds associated with each letter. It’s easiest for your child to begin learning the letters in his name.

Reading milestones:

• Singing the ABC song
• Recognizing the shape of letters
• Starting to learn the sounds of letters: “B” makes the “buh” sound

Sounds of speech: Technically called “phonological awareness,” this is the ability to discern the sounds in words. Word play is key to phonological awareness because it entails listening to the way words sound and recognizing how they change. Developing a sense of syllable is another key part of phonological awareness and is an important precursor to sounding out words.

Reading milestones:

• Identifying letters and realizing that they represent the segments of her own speech
• Understanding that “dog” does not rhyme with “cat”
• Clapping out syllables in familiar and unfamiliar words — cow/ boy, ro/ de/ o

Phonemic awareness: Before children learn to read print, they need to understand that words are made up of speech sounds, technically called phonemes. The 44 phonemes in the English language are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word’s meaning. For example, changing the first phoneme in the word “hat” from /h/ to /p/ changes the word from “hat” to “pat,” and so changes the meaning. Reading expert Louisa C. Moats, co-author of Straight Talk About Reading, says phonemic awareness is essential because our writing system is a representation of speech sounds. “Ninety percent of the time, kids who have reading problems have a weakness in their ability to detect and identify speech sounds,” Moats says.

Reading milestones:

• Naming several words that begin with the same sound — bat, boy, and bell
• Replacing one sound with another — replace the first sound in pig with /d/ to make dig.