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!
Learning (not memorizing) will make reading FUN
This blog post from Imagination Soup suggests as the first of 5 ideas for kids who hate to read:
“1. MODEL. Read the page or sentences first. Have your child repeat.”
This strategy may help a child memorize the appearance of the words. It does not give a child tools to decipher words on his own.
Research shows that children need to learn phoneme awareness (to identify each sound in a word) and phonics (to associate each of those 40 sounds with the letter(s) that stand for that sound). Then they can sound-out words on their own. The next paragraphs explain why I think it’s important for parents and teachers to understand this research:
If a child hates reading, perhaps it is because the way he is being taught sets up inefficient pathways in the brain. Inefficient processing makes reading hard work, and not fun (no matter how interesting the subject matter). (more…)
Assessing Your Child’s Phonics Skills
Children sometimes do well on reading tests in first or second grade because they are good at memorizing the visual appearance of words. You think they are doing fine!
However, when they get to third grade, they may start experiencing more difficulty because they encounter many more words that begin to look alike. If they have not learned to “sound-out” words using phonics skills, they will not be able to decode new words independently, and they may have more and more difficulty as reading becomes more complex. Guessing from context or pictures no longer works if there are too many gaps in a sentence to comprehend the overall meaning. If guessing becomes a strategy, children often begin to feel uncomfortable about reading, because they are not experiencing success. Their confidence lags, and their interest and curiosity can turn to frustration.
Try this simple test to assess whether a child is using phonics and knows how to sound-out new words. The words at the right are nonsense words. Cover the answers and ask the child to read the non-words on this page. The correct pronunciation is suggested in the parentheses. Listen carefully to the pronunciation. When children miss more than three, or take a long time to figure out each word, they need more practice with encoding and decoding words and non-words. The use of phonics should be automatic and unconscious, like riding a bicycle.
If you have our Read, Write & Type software, you can also insert the Spaceship Challenge CD, sign in as a GUEST, and ask children to play Level 2. If they have difficulty naming the pictures and identifying the sounds, or if they do poorly on reading comprehension or spelling, they will benefit from support with the extra activities and games suggested in the day-to-day lessons from our Read, Write & Type activity book. Download it for free on our website, and try practicing with your child today.
To download the activity book in PDF format, look for the link on our website, it’s number 7 on the list of “Read, Write & Type Learning System (RWTLS) PDF Documents”.
Storing Reading In the Closets of the Brain
The most common way to introduce children to the alphabet code is to link letters-to-sounds in order to decipher or “decode” words on a page—that is, to read. Children are shown letters or clusters of letters and are told that those visual squiggles on a page represent sounds or words. But starting with the visual squiggles is putting the cart before the horse. The brain will organize reading better if we reverse the process and link sounds-to-letters instead!
The brain of a newborn is already listening to sounds and trying to make sense of them. Very young children need to have lots of experience listening to spoken words, watching adults or siblings as they speak, and responding to the speech they hear by using their own voices. As the brain builds its capacity for speaking and understanding speech, it organizes a vast data bank of the sounds of words, the meaning of those words, and the complex motor commands that are required for saying those words. These elements are so well organized that this information can be accessed instantly.
The left half of the newborn brain, like a closet, comes with two built-in “shelves” for storing these important elements of communication—the ability to receive meaningful words (UNDERSTAND) and the ability to express (SAY) meaningful words. Humans have been talking for so many thousands of years that our brains have evolved to set aside these two locations—the UNDERSTAND shelf and the SAY shelf– for this specific purpose. These shelves automatically start piling up with vocabulary as babies learn new words. The more the better!
Does a “Great Mind” Need Phonics?
Beware of what you may read in your email. The paragraph below is being passed around the internet with the statement that only great minds can read it (55 out of 100 people), and that spelling isn’t important because you can read any word if the letters are all included and the first and last letter are in the correct place. You will draw a disastrously mistaken conclusion if you infer that children can read this way, or that this has any relevance to learning to read. Here is the paragraph. See if you can read it!
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
Questions Parents Should Ask Teachers of Kindergarten and First Grade Children
If you have been reading this blog, you are aware of the importance of phoneme awareness and phonics to the development of early reading skills. You may already have more knowledge now than your child’s teacher. Parents can find out whether their children will be taught reading well by asking their teachers a few questions:
“Do you think it is important for children to learn that words are made of individual sounds?
How do you teach this skill? Do you teach a specific sequence?
How many sounds do you teach?”
(If teachers say they teach all 40 sounds of English, hurray! If they say they teach the sounds of all 26 letters, you should probe further.)
The Key to Skilled Reading
At the SSSR meeting in Boston, I was fascinated to learn about a new study by Linnea Ehri and Nancy Boyer who taught pre-schoolers to look at themselves in a mirror while pronouncing a word, and then play with mouth pictures that represent the articulation of the same sounds. When children associated those mouth pictures with letters and manipulated the letters to represent the sounds in words, they performed better than children who just manipulated the letters without the articulatory component. So instruction that includes teaching children to become aware of how their mouths move to make the sounds of words would help children make the connections between speech and the alphabet code.
Change is slow…unless we help!
It’s always good to see colleagues and friends at these yearly meetings of SSSR. Louisa Moats and I found ourselves commiserating at lunch one day. Louisa has been teaching the importance of a speech-to-print approach for years. She has lectured widely, taught professional development courses, been active on government advisory panels, and has written an excellent book called Speech to Print. (Also, Straight Talk About Reading with Susan Hall, another excellent book). But, as we said over lunch, it’s sometimes discouraging that change happens so slowly. This is what she said in American Educator in 1998:
“One of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all phonics programs is that they teach the code backwards. That is, they go from letter to sound rather than from sound to letter….the print to sound approach leaves gaps, invites confusions, and creates inefficiencies” (Moats, L. Teaching Decoding, American Educator, 42-49)
THE GOOD NEWS—Many Reading Problems Can Be Prevented!
I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to fly from San Francisco to Boston for a week. I’m attending a conference where I’ll have a chance to talk to many friends and colleagues who have, like me, decided to spend their lives trying to understand why some children have difficulty learning to read and what we might be able to do about it.
It’s the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, a gathering of over 300 researchers from around the world who study everything about reading — brain structure and function, related cognitive and behavioral issues, and instruction and intervention techniques. You can find abstracts of the talks on the SSSR web site. I look forward to learning new things to add to the knowledge I have accumulated from my own research over the last 37 years.
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