Reading Part 2

For some reason I haven't had time to write more about how to teach reading, but I meant to. Here's a wee bit more.

Teaching reading really doesn't need to be a planned thing. You don't need special books. Your child doesn't need to suddenly be able to read a whole book. Lately, Toby and I have been doing lots of reading together where he might read part of a page, or just the easy words, or just not the hard words, or just the first few pages till he tires of it. It's a bummer that most of those "level 1" books are not level 1 at all, but really, you can use whatever you've got. The more familiar your child is with the book already, the better.

Tonight Alicia and I read one of her favorites, "The Runaway Pancake." After a couple pages I stopped,
M: Alicia, pancake starts with /p/(the sound). What letter is /p/?
A: I don't know. P.
M: Yeah. Do you see the 'p' on the page? (without really waiting, I point to the P because I want to go to bed). So what word is this?
A: Pancake.
M: Yeah.
I continued to read the story. I stopped every time I came to the word 'pancake'. It's a very predictable, repetitive story. As I read, I followed the words with my finger. At 'pancake', I'd wait for her to read the word. A couple times she said, 'rabbit' instead. I'd make the /p/ sound and she'd switch to pancake.

Fun stuff.

Now, what is Alicia actually doing when we do this? A couple things. She might be connecting that the letter P and the sound /p/ are connected to each other and connected to the word 'pancake'. Since she corrects to 'pancake' after the prompt of /p/, it's possible that she's making that connection. She is definitely following the story and making good predictions about what could go in that place in each sentence. I know that because 'rabbit' is also a character in the story. If she was giving me wrong answers that weren't characters, the syntax would be off. I would know that she wasn't keeping the meaning and pattern of the story together with any reading attempts. And that says a lot. If you've got a kid (or an adult for that matter) who's giving you nonsensical answers, then there isn't enough connection to meaning, not enough thought coming from the reader's head.

So, the two critical things to happen during reading are using the letters on the page and using all the other knowledge in the reader's head about the story and the language.

Really, I didn't do much with Alicia tonight, but this kind of thing keeps the letters and the meaning matched. It's fine if all or most of the time Alicia was just using her memory of the story to give me the right answers. I would rather that reading activities err (in instructive quality) on the side of exclusively using the reader's knowledge than get too focused on phonics exclusively.

Goodness. I know most of my readers would really benefit most from a list of activities to do. Can you tell I miss writing papers?