Reading

ENTER READING:

A school teacher suggests how to teach preschoolers to read at home

I had been teaching secondary school for about four years when I started to notice a pattern. Many of my tall adult-looking kids were embarrassed to read aloud and they shuffled restlessly, laughed and whispered inaudibly as if any reasonable and merciful teacher would please let them sit down. For some time I thought it was shyness or a problem of one or two individuals only but talking with them one on one I discovered a sadder revelation – many of them could barely read. Somehow in this high-tech, computer literate, well-funded education system, they had fallen between the cracks and now were struggling in ways unimaginable. Not only did they get low marks in English but also in Social Studies, Science, Geography, Legal Studies, in fact in anything that required them to read. And that meant they even got low marks in math because they did not read the problems well, and low marks in any written part of Home economics, Industrial Arts, even Drama and Phys Ed.

Inability to read was standing in the way of their success in nearly all subjects. And what was worse for me to watch was that a long time ago each of them knew that, and made a mental leap to a horrible conclusion- I am stupid. It was completely inaccurate- often they were very very smart. But they had not been taught well and maybe someone inadvertently had also had the audacity to blame them not the poor teaching, which was a heartbreak. Whatever had happened back then, from this they had leapt to another coping mechanism- I will hide this fact; I will mock the system and not even try because that way no one will be able to see my problem. Often the poor readers fell into two groups – the loner isolated kids and the highly visible behavior problems.

I did what I could to help these kids but many of them by age 16 dropped out of school, a few entered the criminal justice system, a few got pregnant. I felt a kind of despair for them.

When my husband and I had our first son, I watched him closely and one day while camping, when he was two I had an idea. It occurred to me that he already was interested in being read to, and in what the letters on the page were, and here was a chance I could use to save him the heartbreak of those kids I had taught. I would teach him to read before he even went to school.

I scoured the market to find material for this early instruction and was sad to see that there were many game books about the alphabet, and some audio and video and even computer games for young kids, but there was nothing that actually taught the skill sequentially from zero ability to say a grade 3 reading level. And I had figured out I needed that because my little son was no different from other kids but that meant he was incredibly logical. It would be very kind to show him how to put letters together to make words. But it would be very cruel to confuse him with oddities of the language right off, with words like orange where ‘g’ sounds ‘j’, or words like ‘ boy’ where y sounds e, or words like ‘night’ where two letters make no sound at all. If I did that, his logical mind would find the system illogical and he might even feel stupid.

I owed him a course that was air-tight in its logic, at least at first, so that he felt a joy in reading and never ran into exceptions to confuse his early theories. I needed a course that was at his interest level for toys and food and little songs and I needed something that he could do for very short times a day – maybe even 10 minutes, to match his attention span.

Another top priority was a course that really taught reading. I had seen too many kids who guessed at words, reading ‘commander’ as ‘computer’ and ‘ devious’ as ‘devil’. I knew that a bad way to teach kids to read was to have them guess at words or to have them memorize little books pretending they could read. I wanted him to actually learn to figure out what the word said, to sound it out. I realized that having him learn a lot of terms like vowel, consonant, digraph, blend, was completely unnecessary. So what was needed was something elegant and simple, with no unnecessary labels- just fun.

I did not want to push him. I wanted to take however long it took, but I wanted to move through the course step by step so he was gradually acquiring the alphabet and how to read. It became apparent that I would have to design the course myself. Maybe another exists but I had not found it.

It really is quite simple to do this, just time-consuming. I would like to explain how other parents can do it with a few basic insights into the learning style of the very young.

At three my son wanted to know what those marks were on the page. I figured if he could name 26 toys he could identify the 26 letters. But I knew I should not teach them all at once. He could not remember them all. I would have to break the task down into pieces, even as slowly as one letter every few days. For each letter I would show the shape, teach a rhyme to explain its shape, show him objects that started with the sound of the letter and show him pictures of these objects.

I decided to teach lower case letters only, to not confuse him. I would not require him to print the letter himself since his manual dexterity was not sophisticated enough- this would be reading only, not printing. And to further simplify, I would make the letter’s name that same sound. H was huh not aitch, m was muh not em. This was eminently logical since those are the sounds those letters make. I would even let him name the letter by its memory device. For instance h was also called ‘house’ since the memory device was that it looked like a house with a chimney.

So the first principle of the course was to simplify, simplify. Teach only one small thing at a time.

The second principle was to understand his frame of reference. I entered into his world by explaining the shape of the letters in stories –s was a snake, w was waves, m was mittens, c was a curl. I entered his world by singing nursery rhymes with that sound at the start, by eating food that day that started with that sound. On the h day for instance we’d sing about Humpty Dumpty, we’d eat a hot dog, we’d look at houses and try on hats. We’d draw happy smiles on faces. We’d immerse ourselves in ‘h’ sounds and I’d label things around the house with that one letter, lower case ‘h’. We’d go for a walk and I’d have him feel the texture of any embossed lower-case h letters we saw. I carefully ignored and did not expose him to any other letters at all, just the one we were studying or ones we had studied. We did not deal with capital letters. I sorted alphabet magnets and alphabet cereal and alphabet soup letters so I only brought to his attention the letter we were studying. Yes it was kind of hard to set up, but my son could see what I was doing.

He could see that this was the sound of the letter, and that the letter was distinguished by its shape. It did not matter if the letter were made of cheese or wood or linoleum carving or plastic or noodles. He discriminated what mattered about the letter was not its color or size. He was doing essential noticing of relevant variables all little kids have to deal with when they first try to read.

Often parents wonder for instance why a child confuses b with d. And yet they expect the child to look at a kitchen chair and call it a chair if it is facing left or right. The child is very logical – he is wondering if the direction of the letter matters or not because it does not matter for labels of other objects. He has to be taught that in this instance direction matters. And I did this for instance with my poem. Every letter’s shape was explained in a story I created. Lower case ‘b’ was ‘bump on bottom’, it sounded ‘buh’ and admittedly the clue could be confused with d. But for ‘duh’ I gave the hint of a doorknob and then a door. First you touch the doorknob, then you open the door. So the child got the message that if the lump at the bottom comes first, it is a doorknob ‘duh’ – the letter d. Studying each letter like this was easy. It was within the understanding of a 3 year old easily and each day we’d review the letter of the previous day and some days we did no more than that. We’d cut cheese slices into that shape, roll plasticene into that shape, and I’d even carve in the sand or write on the blackboard that shape. We revelled in it. And then after a few days we’d move on and do the same with another letter.

I decided not to do the whole alphabet right off. After I had taught 7 letters I added ‘a’ which I said was half an ‘apple’ and it said ah. Then one magic day I reviewed the 8 letters we now knew and I put two together – a t. I sat down with my son and showed him ah then tuh and said them together as I put them together – ah-tuh, ah-tuh, and then said it faster and faster till I was saying ‘at’. He probably had not a clue what I was doing. Then I did the same for three letters we’d studied – puh, ah, tuh. I put them down together from little blocks we’d made, and then I sounded them out together faster and faster till I was saying ‘pat’. I did this a few more times, with sat, sam and then quit for the day and we went to play.

The next day I showed him a few more letter blocks of the 8 we knew and I showed him again how to push them together –r at, ram, pam, hat. I showed him papers with these words printed next to illustrations I’d made of what they meant, and he drew a little pencil line from the word to the picture. The next day we did a few more words with the 8 letters he knew – map, mat, ram, ham.

I recall vividly the first time he put the letters together and sounded them out, nonchalantly. He was reading! What shocked me was that he did not seem surprised at this or anything – it was just a normal progression. He wanted to do more – and by the way I always quit when he wanted to stop and even sometimes made him wait till the next day if he wanted to go on a long time. In this way reading was never a punishment and was always a game.

After our first six letters I brought in another one. Then another and so on, and then after a few more we added another vowel, though I did not of course call it a vowel. Eventually I had introduced him to all 26 letters and along the way, to any logical word combination that could be made with the ones we knew to date. I excluded all words with silent letters, double letters or any exceptional pronunciation of letters from the restricted 26 sounds we’d studied. By the end of the alphabet he could read at least 600 words. His self-confidence was a joy to see and he wanted to do more.

The process took about a year. I figured it was time for the capital letters so I invented stories of how the letters grew up – b got a new bump, h got a new chimney. I created rhymes to remind him of the sounds of the letters and logical stories about letters fighting to explain why some double letters make odd sounds. For instance to explain long sounds of vowels in words like ‘gate’ I’d say guh wanted to talk to tuh but ah got in the way. Ah was always butting in and yelling “Get out of the way, ay” so ah now said ‘ay. In the situation where ‘e’ got in the way, as in ‘Pete’ this little letter is bossy and keeps calling out for attention” It’s me!”. I invented how small ‘I’ says “Hi “, small oh says ‘Hello-o-“, small uh says “How are you- you” and the odd thing is, ridiculous as these stories seem to an adult, to a child they are logical enough and they bridge that gap as he starts to learn a system for reading.

Armed with reasons for shapes of letters and reasons for combinations of letters making new sounds, the child had entered a kind of story land where letters were the characters – but it was a very intriguing word to him and logical. English is one of the least logical and most difficult languages in the world so I knew that if I really wanted to eventually have him read anything well, we’d have to move on to the exceptions and silent letters I continued writing the course and helping him one day at a time, to look at the oddities as funny too. But as I mentionned we did not do this until he was very well grounded in the logic of a system that was easy to understand.

We continued till I had four volumes of books and he had now a reading vocabulary of several thousand words. Best of all, he was equipped to enter school feeling competent and excited about learning.

Here is the poem the child learned, combining rhyme, rhythm, visual clues and logic for the alphabet-

huh is for house

muh is for mittens

puh pretty flower

suh – snake is bitten

wuh is for waves

tuh for traintracks

ruh -round the corner

ah –apple stacks

buh- bump on bottom

cuh –is for curl

duh –is for doorknob

guh –long-haired girl

nuh-nail got bent

ih- it jumped up

eh- egg felll open right into a cup

oh- is for octopus

uh- under umbrella

fuh has a funny top. He’s a strange fella.

juh- just a jet’s trail

kuh –kite on string

luh is for ladder. You climb it in spring.

vuh is for very good

yuh- yarn with tail you see

zuh is for zigzag you draw when you feel happy.

x is for crossing the street where you’ve been

quh is a lady with long dress, a queen.

My husband and I went on to have three more children, who all took this course. All 4 entered grade one able to read and all did very well in school. I for free tutored neighbor kids and later had people drive to my little sessions from all over the city. Eventually we filmed the course on video so that people would not have to drive over. All of the methods work- the workbook with parent, the video, or the small classes. I am sure that other parents are anxious to ensure that their 3-5 year olds too get a headstart for school. Some of my early graduates are now in international baccalaureate programs, and faculties of law, medicine, engineering. I must admit that I am not the only reason they are doing well. But I dare to say I played a small part. It is a real boost to children, maybe the best gift we can give next to love, to teach them to read.

Here are my websites for the preschool reading course

http://www.anchorsandsails.com

http://www.telusplanet.net/public/bjaremko

http://anchorsandsails.tripod.com/howtoteachyourchildtoread
I have made the course into a home- video for those who want to have me do the teaching but in their home at their convenience (and to reuse it for other kids) Teachers have told me the video is also useful for reluctant readers already in school and for immigrant children or teens who need immersion in English.

I have also prepared a faster-paced one volume quick summary of the course for kids who are 10 and up who need a quick review of basic skills. It is called the Reading Refresher. Some have found this quick one also works for people for whom English is a second language.

I have also prepared a slower-paced course for the handicapped. ITips for this are at

http://anchorsandsails.tripod.com/anchorsandsailsintensearadingcourseforthosewithlearnignchallenges

I have a course to teach math to preschoolers. Tips for it are at

http://anchorsailsmath.tripod.com

I have a course for adults with reading problems. It is called Our Little Secret and its website is

http://r_little__1.tripod.com/ourlittlesecret/id1.html

And I have a course to teach reading skills in French. It is at

http://anchorsandsails.tripod.com/ancresetvoiles

I send out free comprehensive brochures of the above tips. Just send me your street address.

Best wishes with your teaching. It’s worth it.

Bev Jaremko, (403)283-2400

521-18 A St. NW Calgary AB Canada T2N2H3

Teacher and mother

Lovely as it is to hold a good book in your hands, there are times when a subject pops up and its great to have instant access to a story, a chapter, a poem or whatever you need. So the idea of these pages is to collect good online libraries of various types of literature together to use as and when required.

Hans Christian Anderson I’ve been to his house! A great place to find nicely written versions of his stories, such as The Snow Queen.

BookChilde A project to draw together access to early childrens literature and resources to use with them.

Our Island Story Stories about the history of the British Isles.

The Baldwin Project To says there is masses here is just a bit of an understatement! Go fill your boots!

Aesop’s Fables Most curricula or philosophies feature these somewhere!

Ambleside Online Excellent place to find links to collections of poetry.

Ideas for more will be welcome!

Kaths account of her son’s reading experience.

Beginning learning to read has been a very, very gradual process so far for my son Mark, who is now 4½. He started Montessori nursery for 3 mornings a week at 3, and he was expected to be able to recognise his name for his peg etc. He was already recognising logos (Tesco, Tweenies etc) and reading his name came easily to him. At about 3½ Mark got quite interested in the idea of being able to read. He’s a perfectionist and thought he should be able to learn how to read immediately! We began with Ladybird’s Puddle Lane stories. They are fun (and easy to pick up secondhand or on eBay) and have a story that an adult reads on one side of the page and an illustration with a short sentence underneath on the opposite page. Being able to read each “Tim” or “Tessa” or “the Magician” as we came to them satisfied Mark’s need to read and he would point out odd words (e.g. “No”) he recognised out and about and ask us to read signs for him. For a while various rooms in the house had yes and no signs on the door which Mark had made, telling us whether we could go in the room or not.

Because his dad was recently diagnosed as dyslexic, we think its important that Mark gets a good grounding in phonics as well as recognising whole words, so he can sound out words and be able to spell the phonetic ones. I’d heard lots of positive comments on “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” both on MuddlePuddle and from another friend, so decided to buy that and give it a try.

For the first few lessons it went quite well, though we didn’t stick with the strict “you must do this every day for 15 minutes” instructions as that would have put him off reading very quickly!! As the number of different sounds built up Mark would get frustrated about the ones he couldn’t remember, and he was also finding blending difficult, so we stopped. I think he needed time to consolidate what he had learned before moving on. He didn’t have the patience/skill to plod on with phonics when he wanted to read straightaway. His nursery used phonics and the same way of sounding letters as we used at home, so that gave him extra practise until he left last summer.

What worked for us next was to change to having a longer story time at bedtime, where I would read a story and then Mark and I would read together, or he would read to me. For his reading we used the Ladybird books again – mostly Puddle Lane and occasionally Peter and Jane and Kate and Sam (the updated versions!) keywords books. The keywords books have no story line, but Mark got a kick out of recognising the words in the first book and then liked some of the silly pictures in the second book. We got into book 3 and it all got a bit too difficult to remember for him. But it helped him learn some of the words and he was chuffed at what he could read. For words he didn’t know, I would sound out the phonetically spelt ones in the slow way that 100 Easy Lessons uses, so he got practise at hearing sounding out.

We also read a lot of rhyming stories and silly poems and basically enjoyed books. A favourite game in the car or waiting for the bus was “I Spy” for several months, and through that Mark practised initial word sounds and blending very informally. All last summer he was obsessed with rhyming and making up silly rhyming songs and recording them on his cassette player – having fun with words. It seemed as though Mark was stuck at the same point for ages, but looking back he was probably firming up all he knew, ready for another jump forward.

We left 100 Easy Lessons for quite a while – maybe 6 months? – and I’d more or less decided that it didn’t suit us. Then early in January we tried out the Headsprout phonics teaching online was mentioned on the Muddle Puddle list, and that sparked Mark off with sounding out again. The program is hopeless for English accents, and if we’d actually used it I think Mark would have been very confused! There was such a twang on the “a” sound that he thought “van” was “ven”. So I said well why don’t we try your sounding out book again (always call it doing sounding out, as there isn’t much straightforward reading in it at the start) and suddenly he was able to blend when he tried. So far he is going ahead fairly well, and its less hard work than previously. I am starting to notice what sounds he can’t say, and he finds that frustrating. He can’t say “th” (like the start of the) so as soon as I know he is trying to say that sound I sound it with him. He also gets in a knot over “l” and so I sound that with him too. With practice he is finding the sounds easier. We’ll see how far we get comfortably this time, but I expect we’ll break again for a while when he reaches a block. At the moment we do half a lesson at a time, reading the words and sounds in one session and practising the short story in the next session – a whole lesson can be too tiring.

As well as practising phonics with 100 Easy Lessons we are also continuing “whole word” reading using the short printable books from ReadingA-Z.com. Mark generally likes the stories and finds them OK to read based on a combination of the keywords he knows, sounding out and working out new words from the context and pictures. Their worksheets to accompany each book are usually fun and use a combination of cutting and sticking, matching pictures with sentences or filling in missing letters. They reinforce some of the phonics he is learning and don’t take long to do.

We also play games such as “Spell It Out” and when the mood takes him do a page of a phonics sticker workbook. I recently spotted some Puddle Lane dominoes in a charity shop so we play that and we have Junior scrabble that we play for short sessions occasionally. Even things like typing emails to friends and family is practising sounds. Just this week I realised Mark recognises the names of his favourite programmes on the Sky channel listings. We don’t do reading every day – just when it naturally fits in with what we are doing or when I have a panic!! If we leave too long between 100 Easy Lesson sessions Mark does seem to find it slightly harder to get back in to though.

I don’t think learning to read is as linear as some experts would have you believe, and sometimes Mark seems to have learned something and then forgets it again later. We’ve found it is very much in fits and starts, and its only looking back over months that the progress is noticeable.

Teaching Reading Using the Phono-GraphixTM in the book ‘Reading Reflex’

Reading Reflex by Carmen McGuiness and Geoffrey McGuiness
ISBN 0-14-028038-3

We came across this book when our d was 18 months old as a result of a feature on Radio 4. We read the book which is a complete teaching reading manual and then made use of parts of it when teaching our d to read. We did not adhere slavishly to the book and it has to be said that our d did quite a bit of the work of teaching herself to read. Once we had got going she seemed to take off of her own accord reading everything in site from cereal packets to printing on her bike frame!

Before we found the above book we had already invested in a tub of magnetic letters from the early learning centre. We taught our d the phonetic alphabet starting off with ‘d’ for daddy, ‘m’ for mummy, ‘H’ for Hannah etc so she had a grasp of initial letter sounds before we started.

Phonographix starts off with games which encourage children to think about how a word is a group of sounds blended together. So, you pick a 3sound word and say the sounds in segmented fashion e.g. d o g The child guesses the word. If they make a mistake sound it out again emphasising the bit they got wrong. Stick to words which use the common sound of each single letter. So words like cat, hat, peg, hot, hit, etc. When the child can segment words you can take it in turns to be the segmenter and blender of words.

Now play a game where you say “I’m thinking of something you wear beginning with ‘h'”. Encourage child to guess an item of clothing (hat). This is a sort of eye spy. You can play it with animals, food anything that appeals.

Building 3 sound words. The book has lots of examples of such words with in a form where you cut out a picture of the word (cat, say) and then have the 3 letters. You encourage the child to choose the picture for the first sound in ‘Cat’ (the picture being ‘C’) You go on with the second sound and third to build up the word. The book goes on to blend the sounds and then write them on a piece of paper while saying them. Since our d’s linguistic skills were far in advance of her fine motor skills we didn’t do any of the mapping at this stage. We used our magnetic letters to build all sorts of 3 sound words.
A game which our d really enjoyed from the book involved starting with a 3 sound word and then exchanging letters (they call them sound pictures) to make new words. You put out a selection of letters and then make the first word. Say you start with ‘dog’. you ask the child to choose from the selection of letters and change dog into cog. Then cog into cot. Then cot into cat and so you go on and on. our d used to love doing these.

The book goes on to give some simple stories that children can now read. No sight words needed. I thought they were very contrived but Dd loved them!

The book goes on with building in adjacent consonants and then on to what it calls the ‘advanced code’. We used various bits from the book at this stage.

However we stopped following the lessons prescriptively as Dd just took off reading. We had, of course, always been reading books to her from about 4 months on (OK she ate them at 4 months) and she loved all sorts including some Dr Seuss books. These proved good early reading material with lots of repetition, rhyme and a zany sense of the ridiculous which appealed to Dd!

The ‘reading reflex’ is not a cheap book (ours cost £23 in 1998). The method appealed to us and worked well with our d.

If anyone wanted more information about either the book or how we used it then email on susanwhitaker@blueyonder.co.uk

(Written by a MuddlePuddle Member)