Reading

I've been saying for a long time that I would blog about how to teach your children to read. And now, I'm going to begin. This could take quite some time.

Josh could read before he was three.
I think I taught Toby to decode just before turning three. I can't remember. It was some time around there.
I taught myself how to read when I was 4 1/2. I'm a late bloomer around these parts.
Alicia isn't ready to read yet.

Thus begins one of the biggest questions: How do you know your child is ready to start reading? The answer: Oh there are so many things. I could also say, Well, what do you mean by reading?

A child doesn't need to know all the names of the letters of the alphabet in order to start reading. For some children, the names get in the way of reading, because the names are not the same as the sounds. Some children have trouble with the fact that the letters can have both a name and a sound. So don't get hung up on knowing all the names. They DO, however, need to be able to differentiate most of the letters from each other. Trouble with d/b is common, but for the most part, children need to spend time with the letters on the fridge, in a puzzle, or jello, or something just so they all look familiar.

Children need a vocabulary of at least 3,000 words before they start to read. I'll need to say lots about decoding at some point, but even after sounding out a word, there is a significant jump that needs to be made in order to match those sounds to a word that is already known. Children also need to have a good sense of what would come next in a sentence. That way, they can make a good guess about what might come next. We do it.

There's the sit still factor. Young children should be running and moving and playing and imagining their own stories. They shouldn't be sitting at the table with their mother for 30 minutes every day learning how to read. I believe that. But I couldn't stop myself from teaching Toby to read. We worked at it for maybe 10 minutes at a time. Maybe once a week. Sometimes I'd wait a few months before getting back to it. And he'd tell you that he hated reading. He'd also laugh at the stories he was reading and look quite proud with himself for being able to read. I think he just didn't want to do something that took that much effort. Should I push? Should I wait? It's hard to know. I don't want him to hate reading, but it didn't ever seem like he really did hate it. And he could totally do it. I also didn't want my son to not do things just because they were hard. But he was young. Yeah, I don't know. Ask Toby when he's 18 if I chose the right time to teach him to read. For now, he's actually choosing to read a book to his dad at night. And he's starting to read random print that he sees here and there. You know your kid. You choose.

I'm not sure that there is conclusive research out there that links the amount of time parents spend reading to their children with children's ease of learning to read. There's some common sense that links those two things, but they don't match up directly. One thing to notice is that written English is quite different from spoken English. Different words will be used with different frequencies in print vs. speech. Much of that has to do with the way that you choose to read a book. How much do you link words or not? What is the melody and rhythm of your voice as you read? For children who haven't been read to, it could sound like a foreign language. But I doubt I have any readers here who don't read to their kids, so we'll move on.

I'm going to jump into decoding in order to explain some more things kids need to be able to do in order to read. When you model decoding for a child, be careful how you pronounce each letter. Try to say the word continuously, without separating the letters, in order to avoid saying something like "da-o-ga". What's a daoga? If you say the consonants by themselves, it's almost impossible to avoid adding an extra vowel. So, string the whole thing together, slowly. Some teachers call it stretching out the word.

Listening to a stretched out word and matching it to a normal word that you know is a skill. Toby's pretty good at it for words that are maybe four or five sounds long, but he still has trouble with longer words. Some kids can't really do just two or three sounds. So you can practice that. Stretch out words and have your child figure out what word it is. It can be an ongoing game. Excellent for the car and in stores. "Next we need to find some mmmeeeeeellllllllkkkkkk. Where would that be?" Okay, people might think you're nuts. But there it is. Your kid is looking around for milk instead of pulling things off the shelves. Toby separates words all the time just for fun. He'll talk like that. If your kid is doing that, make him read.

Another problem with sounding words out is that even if you become an expert at not adding extra vowels, loads of phonetic words still don't sound quite the same when you sound them out as when we actually say them. Music. We add an invisible /y/ between the m and u. Then the s is really a /z/. Actually, s's and ed's can be quite a problem. If they follow a voiced consonant they are voiced /z/ and /d/. If they follow an unvoiced consonant they are unvoiced /s/ and /t/. If they follow certain sounds, they become /ez/ and /ed/. Your child can do this in speech, but the process of decoding and then matching that decoding to a normal sounding word is tough.

I've wound my way out of 'when is your child ready to read' and onto general reading philosophy now.
Phonics or Whole Language? Honestly, I've never understood the philosophy of whole language and how it is supposed to teach reading. I think there are a lot of things going into this. First, I think it's easy to agree that there are real problems with decoding. Still it really is necessary in order to read new words. If a child simply learns that a word that looks like this general shape (tree) means that brown and green thing in front of my house, the child will get stuck at the third grade reading level. The brain can only learn a certain number of shapes and then it maxes out at about third grade reading level. What about those Chinese? Even Chinese characters are combinations. We have to be able to sound out words, there isn't a way around that.

My dearest daughter doesn't yet know all the letters of the alphabet. What intrigues me is that I have been trying to teach her the remaining letters and they just aren't sticking with her. One of those letters is C.
M "What is this?"
A "I don't know."
M "It's the letter for cookie."
A "Oh! That's C!"
I think that whole language advocates would like my daughter and I think my daughter would like them. There does have to be meaning involved. My daughter seems to need a different level of meaning than Toby does or did. I'm thinking that my son might be detail oriented and my daughter might be more global. We'll see if I'm right. When I've tried to begin teaching Alicia to decode, she can't do it at all (yes, I do know that she's 3). I think I might try letting her memorize a simple book, and then go backwards. "You know that this word is 'Maisy.' What letter comes first? Yeah, M. And what's the first sound in Maisy?" First I'll teach her the words and sentences, then the sound-letter correspondence. We'll see what happens.

The bummer for teachers is that they have both types of kids in the same classroom. Know your kid and let their teachers know what you think about how your kid processes things. But elementary teachers have very strong opinions about how to teach reading and might not care what you think. That's when you read this post again and do your own thing at home that suits your child.

Another of my major thoughts about reading that is probably coming through already is that what goes on in the reader's head is extremely important. It's important for decoding and comprehension. So don't do anything to diminish your child's guessing and thinking while reading. When there are mistakes, just remind your child to check the word to see if she is right. When she guesses right, you really won't know whether she read the word or guessed it.

Toby's reading at this point involves an awful lot of looking at the pictures and using his knowledge of English patterns and even story patterns to guess while he's reading. And he should be. And that shouldn't stop as he becomes more proficient. Some of us can get really hung up on kids learning to decode and so we play games in which kids have to read with no context. Grrr, is what I think of those games. Avoid them. Reading should always have context. Words should be in sentences. The sentences should make sense. They should sound like normal written English. Why? Because readers should and need to be able to make guesses about what the words are that they are reading. When we give kids single words to read or books with odd, poorly constructed sentences, we don't respect their ability to make good use of the language they already possess. Now, do we make words out of alphabet cookies at our house? Oh yes. On the fridge, sure. But it's occasional. I wouldn't focus on it. I certainly wouldn't push it or depend on it for instruction.

I've been teaching my adult students different strategies for reading comprehension this year and had a lot of success. Most of my students had some education in their first language as children, but few finished school. Most of them are poor readers in any language. I think that one of the traits common to poor readers is that they don't trust what's in their heads. Here's an example. I wrote out a story for my students that was basically:

Alicia was sick. I took her to the doctor. The doctor wrote a prescription. We went to Walgreens. I asked for flavoring in the medicine because the doctor said that the medicine would taste bad. I gave Alicia the medicine.

I asked my students, when did the doctor tell me that the medicine would taste bad? They answered, At the pharmacy. I asked my students (all perfectly intelligent adults), Did the doctor come with me to the pharmacy? No, they answered without trouble. And then I gave them a lecture about trusting themselves. I think poor readers put too much trust in the print and not enough trust in themselves (my students trusted the order of the story more than they trusted their own common sense). Good reading calls on the reader to make the correct decision about what the word is, but it also calls on the reader to make value judgments, to put things in the right order, and so much more. This is all to say, it's a good thing when your child looks at the picture and makes a guess about the word. It's a good thing when you child reads a sentence and fills in a word that makes sense even if it's wrong. They do also need to learn to check their guesses with the print. I'm afraid that learning to read by predominantly spending time manipulating letters on a table may teach a child to decode, but not to read.

So, that's a start. I still haven't touched what to actually do. I'll get to that.