Fifth post in a series. See here for:
- Introduction:
- Materials:
In today's post I'm going to start writing about method.
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I have, so far, begun formal reading instruction (meaning, I sit down with them and "practice learning to read" regularly) around age five.
Two of my children exhibited definite readiness signs before then. My daughter was two when I discovered that she had somehow learned all the letter names (she spilled a set of Bananagrams tiles on the floor and began announcing them as she gathered them up). My #4 developed an obsession with writing his own name at age four and a half. So, they were definitely interested in words and letters.
The first two hadn't really been interested prior to age five. I respect the notion of waiting until readiness signs are apparent to begin sitting down and working with a child, but I'm okay with starting earlier too. We are the ones who get to direct their education; I trust we can respect their developmental stage along the way. I figure that the important thing is not to push them past the point of frustration, only to encourage going a little bit past the point of comfort.
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One thing I do NOT start with is the alphabet.
I picked up the idea that it might be better to avoid stressing letter names from a book that influenced me, Reading Reflex by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness. I found passages like this (pp. 52-53) convincing:
Many children fail to understand that letters are pictures of sounds. At some point in their literacy development they espouse the notion that letters "make" sounds. This thinking is precisely the reverse of our goal. It's confusing... because it implies that the letter has meaning in and of itself... What we want them to understand is that [the letter] is a symbol for a sound which they need to remember. It helps if they understand the nature of symbols, that they are arbitrary, that they stand for something else just because we agree that they will.
As parents, we can help our new readers to establish a clear understanding of the sound picture nature of text by avoiding certain language when we work with them. "What does that say?" can be replaced with, "Do you remember what we say when we see that?" The term "sound picture" [for a letter or digraph]...[has] been found to be a very powerful and descriptive term which gently forces the logic we seek.
Another common mistake that some parents and teachers make that children find confusing is the use of letter names in referring to the sound pictures. If we refer to 'see' and 'tee' and 'ef', etc. in helping our young readers, we are forcing them to learn two names for each symbol, the letter name and the sound. This is completely unnecessary. Many children can't do this easily and end up remembering only the letter name. They are forever trying to access or remember the sound by cueing off some part of the letter name, "'ef' um 'e'?, no um 'f'?"
Although this translation step is completely unnecessary and confusing, it does work for some letters. The sound that corresponds to the letter 'tee' <t> is found right at the beginning of the letter name. But what about 'see' <c> which usually represents 'c', not 's', and 'em' <m> which represents 'm', not 'e', and 'wie' <y> which usually represents the sound 'ee' as in the word 'happy', and never represents the sound 'w'? If you take the time to analyze the alphabet names and sounds you realize why so many children have trouble. We recommend that you never use letter names when working with your child. Always refer to sound pictures by the sound they represent, not their letter name. The futility of letter name instruction is proven over and over again with every adult nonreader who can recite the alphabet with ease.
When posing a question for your child in which you feel inclined to use a letter name, for example, "What sound does 'tee' represent?" you can easily sidestep the letter name by simply indicating the letter with your pencil or pointer finger and saying, "What sound does that represent?"
I am no longer as dogmatic about it as I used to be (I was dismayed when I found out my two-year-old had stealthily learned the alphabet!) -- I'm not convinced that it will necessarily derail kids if they happen to learn the letter names first. But I have definitely learned to talk about reading without emphasizing the letter names, at least not until the child really understands what it is we're asking them to do.
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The "one-to-one" code, the beginner's code, is a limited set of spellings arranged such that each of the common English phonemes (loosely defined, as you'll see) is represented by a unique spelling. All of these spellings are either single letters or digraphs (letter pairs).
I introduce one or two sounds in each lesson. From the very beginning, we read words containing the sounds in our toolbox; every new lesson, we add another sound or two. After four or five lessons I stop introducing new sounds. We continue reviewing and practicing words that contain nothing but the sounds that are already in our toolbox, until I'm sure that we're ready to add another group of sounds. At any time if the child seems unready to learn more, we can pause where we are and keep practicing what we know, for as long as we like; then when we're ready to go on, we do.
Here are the sounds I introduce in the first group of five lessons. Notation: I enclose the sound between a pair of slashes, and put the letter in quotation marks.
- Lesson 1. /m/ spelled "m" and /a/ (as in bat) spelled "a"
- Lesson 2. /s/ spelled "s" and /o/ (as in lot and log*) spelled "o"
- Lesson 3. /k/ spelled "c" and /t/ spelled "t"
- Lesson 4. /p/ spelled "p" and /n/ spelled "n"
- Lesson 5. /f/ spelled "f"
I took a page from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for my first lesson. One of the things I liked about that book is how the child starts reading words quite early in the process. One of the first words that is read in that book is "am," and that's where I start. I teach the sounds /m/ and /a/, and then I put them together and I show that we spell "am" by putting together the spellings "a" for /a/ and "m" for /m/.
In the second lesson we can review "am" before introducing the basic spellings of /s/ and /o/. This gives us a few more words: "mom" and "Sam," plus you can try "mass" and "moss" and (if it doesn't bother you) "ass" to find out if your child takes easily to your matter-of-fact explanation that a doubled letter almost always* spells the same sound as the single letter would.
In the third lesson we can practice all the words from the previous two, and now the number of words we can spell begins to rise. Once they have learned /k/ spelled "c" and /t/ spelled "t," they acquire the ability to read:
act, acts, ascot, at, cam, Cass, cast, cat, cats, cost, costs, cot, cots, Mac, mascot, mascots, mast, masts, mat, mats, Matt, sac, sacs, sat, sass, scam, scat, scats, Scot, Scots, tact tam, tat, tats, Tom, tomcat, tomcats, toss, tot, tots
Notice that they get "cats" and "tats" but do not get "cams" or "tams." The plural of "cam" or "tam" is formed by adding a /z/ sound, not a /s/ sound, and they haven't learned /z/ yet!
By the time the fourth lesson comes around the word list has really expanded. As you add sounds to your child's toolbox, they can read more and more words, without ever having to resort to a sight word. I'll provide more details about the lists, and an overview of the basic code, in future posts. Next post, I'll give a sort of a script for the lessons in this first group.
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*Assuming you choose to simplify by collapsing the two vowel variations into one, as in the cot-caught merger.
**Almost always, but not always: cf. the two c's in "access."
That's interesting about not emphasizing letter names. I am not sure it would be possible around here to keep them from learning letter names. Do you ever sing the ABC song?
We *are* condensing a two step process into one translation. I hadn't thought about that before.
What do you do about writing? The perennial shortcoming of the early childhood education program in my house is a lack of paper time. We don't get them drawing and writing often enough. So I thought getting the five year old to practice writing his letters would be an easy start, but if that interferes with reading... Anyway I'm interested hearing how you handle that. Just encourage drawing until later?
Posted by: Jenny | 23 January 2016 at 05:22 PM