The beginning reading and writing sub-strand is a key part of developing
foundational language skills in Spanish language arts and reading. This sub-
strand focuses on the skills students need to become proficient readers,
spellers, and writers. As with other strands, the student expectations are
progressive, requiring students to build upon their knowledge and skills as they
advance from grade to grade. Similar to English, beginning readers and writers in
Spanish learn the relationship between letters and sounds by developing
phonological awareness, or the ability to identify and produce sounds in spoken
language. Students develop phonological awareness by producing rhyming words;
identifying and blending syllables; segmenting multisyllabic words; and
blending phonemes, or units of sound, to form words. Students also develop
decoding and encoding skills. Decoding, or making meaning from written symbols, is
what students do when they read. Encoding, or using symbols to create messages, is
what students do when they spell. The TEKS stress the reciprocal relationship
between decoding and encoding; students strengthen their decoding skills as they
practice encoding. In this sub-strand, students demonstrate the relationship
between print and spoken words when they apply phonetic knowledge to decode and
spell words. Students first learn to match sounds to letters and create new
words by changing, adding, or deleting letters. Over time, they decode and spell
increasingly more complex words, such as words with multiple sound-spelling
patterns as well as words with silent H, diphthongs, hiatus, and accents. Students
also decode and spell words using knowledge of prefixes and suffixes and
understand the difference between commonly confused terms such as también
and tan bien. Finally, in this sub-strand younger students develop print awareness
by identifying upper- and lowercase letters,
understanding the structure of words and sentences, and learning how to read and
hold books. Students also develop handwriting
skills and learn to write in cursive. Use the Spanish TEKS Guide resources below to
learn more about different skills that make up the beginning reading and
writing sub-strand.