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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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!

The main words in this booklet  (bat, rat, mat, hat, cat) use seven letters:

a       t        c        h        b        r        m

1. Create a page in your word processor with lots of these letters in large lower case letters, spaced so they can be cut out as letter tiles.  (72 pt Helvetica font is good),

2. Arrange three letters c, a, t on the table in front of your child

3. Look at the cat picture on the last page.

Ask: “Would you like to learn how to write the word cat?”

4. Have your child look in a mirror while saying the word cat.

Observe: “See how your mouth makes different sounds when you say cat?  You have to move your mouth and your tongue to make the different sounds.  These letters stand for the sounds you are making with your mouth.”

Take some time to repeat the separate sounds together:  “c”, “a”, “t”

5, Then arrange the letters c, a, t in sequence to spell out cat as you say the sounds.

“This letter says “c”, this letter says “a”, and this letter says “t”.

6. Mix up the letters and have your child arrange them to spell cat.

NOTE: YOU MAY NEED TO REPEAT THE ABOVE STEPS SEVERAL TIMES.

IF YOUR CHILD IS NOT HAVING FUN, STOP AND HAVE SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT TOGETHER!  THEN TRY AGAIN LATER.

7.  When your child is successful at arranging cat, try the word “at” or “tac”, again pronouncing each sound together and paying attention to what the mouth is doing.

8.  On another day, try cat, at, tac again. Repeat until this is successful.

9.  When you feel your child is ready for another sound and letter, add b to the three cat letters on the table.  Look at the picture of the bat on the first page of the book and talk about bats.  Find the “b” letter on the table.

Repeat the mirror game, while pronouncing the word “bat” and segment it into its separate sounds, “b”, “a”, “t”.

“To make the “b” sound, you press your lips together and pop the air out.”

Point out that “bat” sounds like “cat”, except for the first sound.  Arrange the word bat on the table and sound it out.  Then mix up the 4 letters and play with bat and cat and tab.

10.  Repeat with the other letters one at a time: h    r   m for hat, rat, and mat. You can read the booklet together—wait when you come to one of the words you have worked on to see if you child will read it.

Eventually you will add s   f and i (one at a time) for writing and reading the words in the second book “SASS HAS A FIT!” for Sass, has, fit, sit, etc.

Then with these nine letters you can write more words like sat, fat, bit, etc.  Always practice with the previous words before you proceed to new sounds and letters.  Make the sessions short and fun!

Our software, Read, Write & Type can add to the fun.

Try it for only $35 at www.talkingfingers.com. Check out our special holiday discounts as well, when you sign up for our email newsletter.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

“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!

“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).

Memorizing the appearance of words is a pattern recognition task. The right side of the brain is best at pattern recognition. Brain research shows that struggling readers use the right side of their brain, probably using pattern recognition strategies. But intervention with phonics not only improves their reading, but moves the brain activation to the left side where the meaning and pronunciation of words are stored. Learning to sound-out words is a better way to make sure that the 3 critical elements of reading–the visual appearance, the pronunciation, and the meaning are all stored together in the left hemisphere of the brain. With practice, the child no longer has to sound-out the words because the visual appearance is stored in the left side, and is efficiently connected to the meaning and the pronunciation of the word.

A child will stop hating reading when reading is easy. Reading will be easy when reading pathways are efficient.

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”.

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!

But since reading is a relatively new task in the evolutionary scheme of things, the brain does not have an automatic READ “shelf” for storing reading. It does its best at “putting away” this new information, but sometimes it is not organized well.  Sometimes, if the new information about visual words requires a lot of pattern analysis, or comes in a haphazard or confusing way, or in the wrong order, critical elements of reading can be stored on the wrong shelves, or even across the hall in the pantry.

To continue this metaphor about storage, the left half of the brain, the “closet”, is for storing things about language and the right half of the brain, the “pantry” is for storing other processes like recognizing spatial patterns, contours, configurations, and faces. If words are initially stored as visual patterns, it may become very inefficient to cross the “hall” (the fibers connecting the two halves of the brain) to search for information about their meaning and their pronunciation in the “closet”. These READ words should be located in the closet, right next to “UNDERSTAND” and “SAY”.

It’s like looking for your socks. You have a better chance of finding clean socks quickly in the morning if you pair them and always keep them in the same place. This is a very oversimplified way to think about the brain, which is actually an enormously complex organ, but the metaphor may serve to illustrate what happens when children have difficulty reading—the essential elements of reading are not connected together by efficient neural pathways.

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!

The paragraph is actually readable, but only by adults (or efficient readers) who have ALREADY LEARNED TO READ (AND CAN PREDICT WHAT’S COMING FROM THE MEANING OF THE SENTENCE).

When children are learning to read, the brain has to figure out where to store this new information.  The new process of reading needs to be well connected to the already established neural networks of speech.  This is accomplished by establishing automatic links between the speech sounds in words and the letters that stand for them.  After repeated exposure to the word, and decoding by “sounding-out”, eventually the brain stores the whole word for automatic visual recognition near the speech areas (Shaywitz “word form” area), and the meaning is accessed instantly by accessing the PRONUNCIATION. So three critical elements must be well connected–pronunciation, meaning and the visual appearance of the word. If words are not stored in this way, there is inefficiency in the neural pathways and reading becomes a struggle.

Adults can read words instantly, and can read garbled words like the above paragraph, so adults have sometimes concluded, erroneously, that children learning to read can do the same, and should therefore just memorize the visual appearance of words without using phonics.  This thinking unfortunately led to the “whole language” movement which set reading scores into a downward spiral wherever it replaced a good phonics-based curriculum.