How to Improve your 1st Grader’s Reading Skills

(A note from our good friend and ambassador, Fred Lewis:)

What I’ve learned from my ten years of volunteering in school computer labs: The MOST important grade for increasing efficiency and reading skills in school is FIRST GRADE. And first graders can definitely learn to touch-type. No matter what the obstacles (and there were many) it’s important to encourage each kid to really learn to touch type. It takes practice, but with Read, Write & Type the practice is fun! Kids have such a wide variation in how their brains are wired, there’s a huge difference in practice time to learn the sound-to-keystroke (letter) habit. But the practice is worth it, because they’re learning the skills they need for reading and writing at the same time. And if they master the keyboard they are much more efficient and confident in their writing all through the rest of their school years.

-Fred Lewis

Recommended Reading: Proust and the Squid

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf (HarperCollins, 2007) is the most well-written and inspiring book about the reading brain that I have ever read.  What a remarkable writer!—a rare thing among scientists.  If you are interested in how the brain works to develop skilled reading, do yourself a favor and read it!

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Here are some quotes from the book that I would like to share with you:

“Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences.   Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be shaped by experience.  This plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design forms the basis for much of who we are and who we might become.”  Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, HarperCollins, NY, 2007

“Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually.” Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, HarperCollins, NY, 2007

A Call to Improve Reading with Writing

I want to recommend a new report from the Carnegie Corporation of NY called WRITING TO READ: New Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. It is an urgent call to include more writing across the curriculum. According to findings from the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 34 percent of 4th grade students and 43 percent of 8th grade students score at the “basic” level, (only partial mastery of grade level reading) and 33 percent of 4th graders and 26 percent of 8th graders scored “below basic” in reading. The picture for writing is even worse: two-thirds of 8th grade students and three quarters of 12th graders score at “basic” or “below basic” in writing. This is a tragic situation that must be addressed, starting at pre-school and kindergarten. Take up the challenge!

Find out more and download the report here: To Improve Reading, Teach Writing (on the ASCD Inservice Blog)

To Teach Reading, Start with Speech

Speech is the foundation of reading, but we teach from print-to-speech, rather than from speech-to-print. A four or five year old may have difficulty generating natural curiosity about two-letter blends or the number of syllables in a word (as taught by traditional phonics instruction). Likewise, there is nothing inherently interesting about an initial or ending sound. Activities like identifying initial sounds, or clapping syllables, or counting phonemes, are isolated from meaningful words and are aimed at listening for phonemes rather than saying them.

However children are curious about how whole words get on paper because they already know a lot about spoken words. Piaget and Vygotsky both noted the role of curiosity, and observed that learning occurs when new information is linked to previously learned information. The purpose of the alphabet is to make spoken words visible. Therefore, instruction in the alphabet should demonstrate how it can be used to represent (previously learned) spoken words. Start with a few letters to sound out and spell words like CAT, HAT, FAT, SAT, and then gradually introduce new words that add to the previous letters and sounds already learned. Your child will be building new neural pathways for reading closely linked to what the brain already knows about words—their pronunciation and their meaning.

Teach Reading Properly from the Beginning

Recent brain studies are concluding that the automation of letter-speech sound processing takes many years to develop because it is not just the learning of an association, but a neurobiological integration process involving the linking of speech and reading networks. The young reader must combine a large number of paired-associate memories (26 letter shapes, 40 speech sounds –26 more if he learns both capital and lower case shapes) and organize them in his brain in such a way that they can be combined and recombined in immediate and instantaneous access to word pronunciations and word meanings.

To achieve automatic visual word recognition, these networks must begin to accomplish with one stroke of attention what originally required dozens. The young brain must systematize the work to be done and must develop a system of automatic habits corresponding to the system of tasks, because reading (unlike speech) does not come pre-wired. As reading is first introduced, the brain organizes and stores the information wherever it is processed. If the instruction involves pronouncing and segmenting whole words, and linking letter shapes to those spoken sounds in a systematic way, these new networks, over time and with practice, will be linked efficiently to word pronunciations and meanings.

Therefore it is important that early instruction in phoneme awareness and phonics encourages children to attend to their own physical production of phonemes as they segment words, and builds new reading skills on the neural foundation of existing speech networks.

The Danger of Teaching “Sight Words”

I read a question from a parent yesterday (on “Classroom Talk”), asking how to help her child learn the long list of sight words that the first grade teacher gave her child. This is my response:

“Children in first grade should not be given lists of sight words to memorize. They should be learning to decode (sound out) and encode (write) regularly spelled words, NOT MEMORIZE THE VISUAL APPEARANCE OF WORDS.

First graders should be learning to identify the sounds in words they say and link letters to those sounds. This is called phoneme awareness and phonics, and these are the critical skills for becoming a good reader. Your first grader should read words like GO and SEE by knowing the sounds that those letters stand for, and sounding out the words. As he does this often, his brain will start to automatically recognize the words. This will enable him to sound out and read or write any regularly spelled word independently. He will not have to visually memorize lists of words, except for those few that are “outlaw words” (don’t follow the rules), and he should only tackle these after he’s mastered phoneme awareness and phonics.

If he is not learning phoneme awareness and phonics at school, teach him at home. Try asking him to read some nonsense words like MUN or SAF. If he can’t do this, ask his teacher whether she is teaching him to sound out words. If you want him to be a good reader in second grade, teach him these skills NOW yourself. There’s lots of good information on the web about how to become aware of the sounds in words and link those sounds to letters.”

Phoneme Awareness vs Phonics?

The National Institute for Literacy has some good tips for teaching phoneme awareness (being able to identify the separate sounds in words) a critical skill for learning to read.

However, they suggest that 20 hours of class time should suffice for teaching phonemic awareness. Since close to 70% of American 4th and 8th graders cannot read proficiently, and since phoneme awareness and phonics are the two most frequently found deficits in children who struggle to read, perhaps we need to re-evaluate whether students are really learning this skill in the 20 hours of instruction they receive. What do you think? Are phoneme awareness and phonics separate skills? Or should they be linked so that children understand why they are asked to become aware of the sounds in words?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Is Your Child Engrossed in Media 53 hours/week?

A new study put out by Kaiser Family Services tells us that children are using media like TV, music, and internet social media more than 7.5 hours a day—that comes to an average of 53 hours a week of mostly passive experience! Yes, they text, but what kind of thought goes into texting or tweeting?  Are their brains really processing and analyzing and digesting new information?  Unfortunately, no.

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A Simple Gift That Lasts for a Lifetime: Teach Your Kids to Read

At this time of gift-giving, when money is tight, why not give your child a gift that won’t cost you anything but time and love, and will last a lifetime.  Here is a recipe for getting started:

There are 18 FREE decodable booklets in pdf form on our website.

Print out the first booklet “IS IT A CAT?”  Look at the first book together, and read it to your child.  But don’t try to have your child memorize the appearance of words or “read” the book until you have played together making words.

The secret of learning to read is understanding how to make words first! If your child can arrange letter tiles to create the words in the first booklet, he or she is well on the way to understanding how letters are used to represent the sounds in words—and that is the key to reading! (more…)

Are you teaching phonics backwards?

“One of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all phonics programs, including traditional ones, is that they teach the code backwards.  That is, they go from letter to sound instead of from sound to letter.”

Louisa Moats, 1998

What do you think about this quote from Louisa Moats?

How do you teach phonics? Method A or B?  Why?

A. Print-to-Speech. Letters-to-sounds. Decoding.

Teach the alphabet song.

Associate 26 visual letters with their names.

Then teach letter sounds.

Decode a familiar word together, like CAT by identifying each letter, saying the sound that is associated with that letter, and blending the sounds together.  If the blended sounds resemble the word, the word is decoded as CAT.

Use flash cards to practice letter names, and words.

B. Speech-to-Print.  Sounds-to-letters. Encoding.

Start with a familiar spoken word, like CAT

Segment together the three sounds in the word.

From a few letter tiles, find the letters that stand for those sounds. Arrange the tiles to represent (encode) the sequence of sounds in CAT. Mix up the letters until the child arranges them correctly. Read the word. Discuss other words in the same family, like FAT or HAT.  By working with other Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words, eventually the child learns the letters that represent the 40 sounds of English.  Encode words first, then decode (read) what has been written.

How do YOU teach early reading?   Let’s have a discussion!