Teaching reading to children
Dec. 6th, 2024 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickToday I listened to a podcast called Sold a Story regarding the teaching of reading to children. If you don't have kids or don't know much about education, this approach to teaching reading used the idea that context, cue-ing strategies, and whatnot could better teach reading than, for example, explaining about phonics and teaching legit "decoding strategies" that help kids link the letter combos in front of them to the sounds of the words they already know. For a while, starting in the mid-eighties or whatever, this idea took prominence in the education world and it was kinda how they... taught reading.
Unfortunately, this method of "teaching reading" didn't do so well at actually teaching reading. And that's what the podcast is about.
How SHOULD reading be taught? I don't know. I have been able to read for the last fifty years, give or take, and I learned to read when I was four. I do not remember not being able to read or really... learning to read. I mean, I did manage it and I have some idea of how I did it, but I don't think that what worked for me would work for everyone.
How did I learn to read?
I have always been very good at the English language. Not kidding. I talked in sentences at 9 months old. (Mom nearly dropped me. Dad was leaving for work. Mom had me, in arms, "Wave bye bye to daddy!" and so I was "Daddy go bye-bye!" doing my little kid wave with my chubby little hand. Mom was "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" and, according to her, I looked straight at her like she was an idiot and said "Daddy go bye-bye.") I have been talking straight through since then. Early and often. I realize that average kids do not talk in sentences at nine months. I can only tell you what my mother told me.
I lived in a text-rich environment where there was a lot of appropriate reading material around me. We had books of all sorts, both adult books and kid books, in the house all the time. We had more than five hundred books, in the house, easily.
I was read to from the very beginning of my life, extensively read to, by a parent. Mom read the entirety of the Little House series, aloud. She read all the Winnie the Pooh books aloud. She read a million little kid books. We (all together) read and worked through Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day (brother the younger called it the "People Do" book and he loved it to pieces). Mom read to us so damn much. For what it's worth, Mom was a fucking OUTSTANDING reader-alouder. Like, THE VERY BEST EVER. She did the voices and she was GOOD at them. Mom read to us aloud all the damn time, near as far back as I can remember, and she did it until The Swiss Family Robinson. By then, I could sight read the pages faster than she could read them aloud and the "Turn the page already Mom, I'm done reading it" thing got old. She never read us another book after The Swiss Family Robinson, that was the last one.
Both of my parents were college graduates. They were clever people. Mom had taught high school English before she had kids, so that was another leg up on the whole education thing.
Mom and dad read constantly, modeled reading for pleasure, for themselves, reading their grown-up books, in their spare time as a leisure activity. They also modeled looking things up in the encyclopedia (it was the 1970's, there was no internet) when we wanted to know stuff. Mom read and followed recipes in cookbooks to make things, another demonstration of Reading Is Useful. She made a grocery list and read it in the store. We also had library cards as very young children and went to the library regularly. Mom ran a Story Hour for other kids at the local library. We saw people close to us read all the time and it was portrayed as a desirable and useful activity.
As well, long before we could read, we played made-up word games, led by Mom. Like, "Let's name words that start with the same sound. Let's do the "B" sound. I'll start: Ball. What's another word that starts the same as Ball? (ball, boy, book, bank, "bread"? No, bread is "BR". It's a little different. Can you name some other "BR" words? Broom, break, bring, breathe. Excellent. How about some TR words? Tree, trigger, trip, treat." You do not need to read or spell to play these games. You just need to know what words sound like... but you start to notice and THINK about the Sounds of Words and how some of them start with the same sound or end with the same sound and how that might be... useful?
We did these in the car, on trips to the grocery or whatever. Any time there was dead time, we did word games.
We did rhymes. Sing, spring, bring, sling, thing. All of those words end with ING and they all sound the same. Rhymes were A THING and we did rhymes a lot. Rhymes were fun.
We looked at road signs. Oh, look at that red sign. Can you read the letters on that red sign? S-T-O-P, very good! That says "STOP". ST makes the "ST" sound. We see STOP signs all the time when we're driving, don't we? And they're always red octogons that say S-T-O-P, STOP.
When I asked Mom about it, she said that she worked like hell at verbal ability, word awareness, word sounds, rhymes, signs, all that stuff, because it would be helpful for learning to read. My mom was convinced that Learning To Read was the single most useful thing we could possibly learn as children and she was ON BOARD with it.
As it happened, I learned to read when my older brother was in kindergarten. I was a year younger. It was fall. Brother the elder was sent home from kindergarten with reading books that he was supposed to "read" with an adult in the household (it was the seventies, so the directive was totally 100% "read this with your mom" but let's pretend it was a more enlightened age than it actually was). Mom, of a Lawful Good disposition, obeyed the school directive and would sit with Brother the elder in the big comfy chair after dinner and they would read the assigned book, together.
I was not allowed to be on the lap in the big comfy chair even though there was room. It was Very Important Schoolwork for Brother the elder and I was not allowed to play. Next year, when you are in kindergarten, my mother explained, you will have Very Important Schoolwork of your own and then you will get individual time on my lap in the big comfy chair. As I was not a Big Kid but had to wait for next year, all I got to do was to lean over the back of the chair, peering over my mother's shoulder, to get a glimpse of the pages and the Very Important Schoolwork.
Brother the elder, who was (and remains) hyperactive and dyslexic, struggled with the Very Important Schoolwork. He'd get stuck on words and mom would patiently coach him through sounding it out and doing the letter blends with him and prompting and shit. It took forever and he got stuck on the same word more than one time. When I shouted out the words, instead of waiting for brother-the-elder to puzzle them out, I got told to find somewhere else to be because I was not helping matters and another reminder that my season would come, next year.
I was not impressed with this. And so I was motivated. I desperately wanted to be A Big Kid and doing Very Important Schoolwork of my own and, honestly, HOW DARE THEY STOP ME?!?!? So, motivation was a thing.
As a literacy-focused household, when brother the elder was in kindergarten, we also got I Can Read books that arrived by mail. They generally came three to a package and were a cause for much excitement when they arrived. When they came, Mom would let brother-the-elder select the "most interesting" of the three books (by the cover) and then they'd go read it together. I was not invited because "not helping matters" and because this was also somehow related to his Very Important Schoolwork.
So, I generally flipped through one of the less-interesting books until they were done with "reading" the interesting book first and then mom would read it to both of us, together. One of the "less-interesting" books that arrived, in a set of I Can Read books that came that fall was Frog and Toad Are Friends. It was the one I took while mom and brother-the-elder went off to read the most-interesting-looking book.
I sat at the dining room table, by myself, and I went through the book. According to my mother (I have no memory of this), when I got to the end, I closed it and announced loudly that I was "done".
Mom: "Done what, daughter of mine?"
Me: "Done reading the book."
Mom: "Daughter, you can't read. Did you mean to say you were done looking at the pictures?"
Me: "No. I read it. I can read."
Mom: "Fine, then, show me." And she left brother the elder and came over to the dining room table, where she leaned over my shoulder while I read aloud to her Frog and Toad Are Friends, a page at a time.
...
And, according to Mom, I did a legit job of it. When I got done, what happened was this:
...
Mom: "Ok. You can read. Get the other book and work through it while I finish reading with your brother." And she went back to the big comfy chair with brother the elder.
She did not seem anywhere near as happy as I'd expected her to be. There was no "Yay, you did it!" celebration stuff. It was very low-key. She did not seem impressed at all. I remember being somewhat confused about the lack of enthusiasm from her. But whatevs. I went and got the other book and started to work through it.
Much later, literally twenty years later, I asked mom why she wasn't happy when I read her about Frog and Toad. Mom explained that teaching dyslexic and hyperactive brother the elder to read had been proving to be a bit of a strugglebus. (Fwiw, he has a master's degree now and reads just fine, if somewhat more slowly than I read.) She said that she'd been looking forward to teaching me to read the following year. And when I could already read, she was kinda pissed that she wasn't going to get do it, hence the lack o' enthusiastic yay from that quarter.
School played a part, I guess, but it wasn't the big part. By the time I went to kindergarten, I could already read. It took my kindergarten teacher until about October to send home a note informing my mother that I could read. Mom sent a note back: "We know, thanks. She taught herself when she was four." I did not learn a lot about reading in kindergarten.
In either kindergarten or first grade, there was an alarming amount of emphasis on the "schwa" sound, which was represented by an upside-down backward letter e (lowercase) that apparently it was important for us to be able to write for... reasons? I did not understand why we had to know about the schwa, but I do remember having to write an upside down and backward letter e and being infuriated that it wasn't a "real" letter and that there was no point to it.
But that's all I know about learning to read.
Anyway, it's an interesting podcast and if you're interested in that sort of thing, you might give it a listen.
Unfortunately, this method of "teaching reading" didn't do so well at actually teaching reading. And that's what the podcast is about.
How SHOULD reading be taught? I don't know. I have been able to read for the last fifty years, give or take, and I learned to read when I was four. I do not remember not being able to read or really... learning to read. I mean, I did manage it and I have some idea of how I did it, but I don't think that what worked for me would work for everyone.
How did I learn to read?
I have always been very good at the English language. Not kidding. I talked in sentences at 9 months old. (Mom nearly dropped me. Dad was leaving for work. Mom had me, in arms, "Wave bye bye to daddy!" and so I was "Daddy go bye-bye!" doing my little kid wave with my chubby little hand. Mom was "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" and, according to her, I looked straight at her like she was an idiot and said "Daddy go bye-bye.") I have been talking straight through since then. Early and often. I realize that average kids do not talk in sentences at nine months. I can only tell you what my mother told me.
I lived in a text-rich environment where there was a lot of appropriate reading material around me. We had books of all sorts, both adult books and kid books, in the house all the time. We had more than five hundred books, in the house, easily.
I was read to from the very beginning of my life, extensively read to, by a parent. Mom read the entirety of the Little House series, aloud. She read all the Winnie the Pooh books aloud. She read a million little kid books. We (all together) read and worked through Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day (brother the younger called it the "People Do" book and he loved it to pieces). Mom read to us so damn much. For what it's worth, Mom was a fucking OUTSTANDING reader-alouder. Like, THE VERY BEST EVER. She did the voices and she was GOOD at them. Mom read to us aloud all the damn time, near as far back as I can remember, and she did it until The Swiss Family Robinson. By then, I could sight read the pages faster than she could read them aloud and the "Turn the page already Mom, I'm done reading it" thing got old. She never read us another book after The Swiss Family Robinson, that was the last one.
Both of my parents were college graduates. They were clever people. Mom had taught high school English before she had kids, so that was another leg up on the whole education thing.
Mom and dad read constantly, modeled reading for pleasure, for themselves, reading their grown-up books, in their spare time as a leisure activity. They also modeled looking things up in the encyclopedia (it was the 1970's, there was no internet) when we wanted to know stuff. Mom read and followed recipes in cookbooks to make things, another demonstration of Reading Is Useful. She made a grocery list and read it in the store. We also had library cards as very young children and went to the library regularly. Mom ran a Story Hour for other kids at the local library. We saw people close to us read all the time and it was portrayed as a desirable and useful activity.
As well, long before we could read, we played made-up word games, led by Mom. Like, "Let's name words that start with the same sound. Let's do the "B" sound. I'll start: Ball. What's another word that starts the same as Ball? (ball, boy, book, bank, "bread"? No, bread is "BR". It's a little different. Can you name some other "BR" words? Broom, break, bring, breathe. Excellent. How about some TR words? Tree, trigger, trip, treat." You do not need to read or spell to play these games. You just need to know what words sound like... but you start to notice and THINK about the Sounds of Words and how some of them start with the same sound or end with the same sound and how that might be... useful?
We did these in the car, on trips to the grocery or whatever. Any time there was dead time, we did word games.
We did rhymes. Sing, spring, bring, sling, thing. All of those words end with ING and they all sound the same. Rhymes were A THING and we did rhymes a lot. Rhymes were fun.
We looked at road signs. Oh, look at that red sign. Can you read the letters on that red sign? S-T-O-P, very good! That says "STOP". ST makes the "ST" sound. We see STOP signs all the time when we're driving, don't we? And they're always red octogons that say S-T-O-P, STOP.
When I asked Mom about it, she said that she worked like hell at verbal ability, word awareness, word sounds, rhymes, signs, all that stuff, because it would be helpful for learning to read. My mom was convinced that Learning To Read was the single most useful thing we could possibly learn as children and she was ON BOARD with it.
As it happened, I learned to read when my older brother was in kindergarten. I was a year younger. It was fall. Brother the elder was sent home from kindergarten with reading books that he was supposed to "read" with an adult in the household (it was the seventies, so the directive was totally 100% "read this with your mom" but let's pretend it was a more enlightened age than it actually was). Mom, of a Lawful Good disposition, obeyed the school directive and would sit with Brother the elder in the big comfy chair after dinner and they would read the assigned book, together.
I was not allowed to be on the lap in the big comfy chair even though there was room. It was Very Important Schoolwork for Brother the elder and I was not allowed to play. Next year, when you are in kindergarten, my mother explained, you will have Very Important Schoolwork of your own and then you will get individual time on my lap in the big comfy chair. As I was not a Big Kid but had to wait for next year, all I got to do was to lean over the back of the chair, peering over my mother's shoulder, to get a glimpse of the pages and the Very Important Schoolwork.
Brother the elder, who was (and remains) hyperactive and dyslexic, struggled with the Very Important Schoolwork. He'd get stuck on words and mom would patiently coach him through sounding it out and doing the letter blends with him and prompting and shit. It took forever and he got stuck on the same word more than one time. When I shouted out the words, instead of waiting for brother-the-elder to puzzle them out, I got told to find somewhere else to be because I was not helping matters and another reminder that my season would come, next year.
I was not impressed with this. And so I was motivated. I desperately wanted to be A Big Kid and doing Very Important Schoolwork of my own and, honestly, HOW DARE THEY STOP ME?!?!? So, motivation was a thing.
As a literacy-focused household, when brother the elder was in kindergarten, we also got I Can Read books that arrived by mail. They generally came three to a package and were a cause for much excitement when they arrived. When they came, Mom would let brother-the-elder select the "most interesting" of the three books (by the cover) and then they'd go read it together. I was not invited because "not helping matters" and because this was also somehow related to his Very Important Schoolwork.
So, I generally flipped through one of the less-interesting books until they were done with "reading" the interesting book first and then mom would read it to both of us, together. One of the "less-interesting" books that arrived, in a set of I Can Read books that came that fall was Frog and Toad Are Friends. It was the one I took while mom and brother-the-elder went off to read the most-interesting-looking book.
I sat at the dining room table, by myself, and I went through the book. According to my mother (I have no memory of this), when I got to the end, I closed it and announced loudly that I was "done".
Mom: "Done what, daughter of mine?"
Me: "Done reading the book."
Mom: "Daughter, you can't read. Did you mean to say you were done looking at the pictures?"
Me: "No. I read it. I can read."
Mom: "Fine, then, show me." And she left brother the elder and came over to the dining room table, where she leaned over my shoulder while I read aloud to her Frog and Toad Are Friends, a page at a time.
...
And, according to Mom, I did a legit job of it. When I got done, what happened was this:
...
Mom: "Ok. You can read. Get the other book and work through it while I finish reading with your brother." And she went back to the big comfy chair with brother the elder.
She did not seem anywhere near as happy as I'd expected her to be. There was no "Yay, you did it!" celebration stuff. It was very low-key. She did not seem impressed at all. I remember being somewhat confused about the lack of enthusiasm from her. But whatevs. I went and got the other book and started to work through it.
Much later, literally twenty years later, I asked mom why she wasn't happy when I read her about Frog and Toad. Mom explained that teaching dyslexic and hyperactive brother the elder to read had been proving to be a bit of a strugglebus. (Fwiw, he has a master's degree now and reads just fine, if somewhat more slowly than I read.) She said that she'd been looking forward to teaching me to read the following year. And when I could already read, she was kinda pissed that she wasn't going to get do it, hence the lack o' enthusiastic yay from that quarter.
School played a part, I guess, but it wasn't the big part. By the time I went to kindergarten, I could already read. It took my kindergarten teacher until about October to send home a note informing my mother that I could read. Mom sent a note back: "We know, thanks. She taught herself when she was four." I did not learn a lot about reading in kindergarten.
In either kindergarten or first grade, there was an alarming amount of emphasis on the "schwa" sound, which was represented by an upside-down backward letter e (lowercase) that apparently it was important for us to be able to write for... reasons? I did not understand why we had to know about the schwa, but I do remember having to write an upside down and backward letter e and being infuriated that it wasn't a "real" letter and that there was no point to it.
But that's all I know about learning to read.
Anyway, it's an interesting podcast and if you're interested in that sort of thing, you might give it a listen.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-07 05:05 am (UTC)My family was always really reading-oriented, so I did learn to read pretty early. Obviously I was really lucky to have parents who wanted to read to me and had the time to do so, and enjoyed doing it. I know not everyone is in the same situation.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-07 08:59 am (UTC)I became an author when I grew up :-)