Value Bookshop’s Reading Notes

Are you encouraging your children to read books? Cultivating good reading habits while children are still young will benefit them tremendously when they grow older. Don’t wane on your encouragement when children start school and have homework to do. Don’t bog them down with extra curricular activities that they have no time to read books. Even when they are already fluent in reading, make time to read together. It doesn’t hurt to read to them, it only motivates them more.
Below is one mother’s testimony on how reading books is essential to young children.
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When I went into the first parent teacher conference for my daughter, her teacher gave me a glowing review and reminded me that one of the best things I could be doing with her is reading books. This is something that we have been doing ever since she has been old enough to focus her eyes on a picture, even if she wasn’t yet old enough to understand what the words meant. Reading was something we did with her all of the time, and it shows in how well she is doing now that she is in school.

Reading Books
Reading is one of the most important things that anyone can do. There are some that slip through school and out into the real world without being able to read. I don’t understand how that happens, but it does. I can’t imagine living in a world where reading books would be something I could not do. This is something that is essential to a good life, and it usually starts out with reading books when we are very young, even if we just look at them for a moment and then chew on them for a while.

If you aren’t sure about which reading books you should be reading to your child, don’t think so hard. There are hundreds if not thousands of books out there just for children and any of them will do. When they are young, look for reading books that have large colorful pictures, and that may have few words. The stories should be very simple and should wrap up quickly. As they get older, the books can then become a bit more detailed, though pictures are still very important. When they start school, relating pictures to words is going to be very helpful. More on Education Resources.

For many adults, reading a book or newspaper seems effortless. Yet reading effortlessly comes from constant use of basic skills learned at an early age. Once children learn these basic skills, they can eventually read complex books like War and Peace.

What are these skills? To read, one must recognize thousands of words. Since all English words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task of recognizing letters and their sounds and putting them together to form words becomes greatly simplified. An English-speaking child only has to sound out the letters and then put the sounds together to read the word. This is not games and music, but not difficult.

I do not wish to over-simplify the complexity of our rich English language, however. Like other western languages, English has its peculiarities. For example, many vowels have more than one sound, and many sounds can be spelled more than one way. However, even with these complexities, English is far easier to learn than Chinese, where children have to memorize thousands of word pictures, rather than twenty-six letters and their sounds.

Reading is difficult at first, but, once learned, the process becomes automatic and unconscious. When we can read quickly without sounding out every letter of every word, all the knowledge of the world opens to us. However, like learning to drive a car, if we don’t learn the basic skills, we don’t learn to read, or we read poorly.

Enter public-school education theorists who think otherwise. Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word, they ask? So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the alleged boredom, drudgery, and hard work of learning letter-sounds? How can reading be joyful if literature becomes drills? If children memorize whole words instead of putting together letter sounds, all this pain will be gone. Rather than teaching kids the alphabet and how to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R, teach them to recognize MOTHER and other whole words in a book, like Chinese word-pictures or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Have the child read simple books that repeat each word over and over, so that they come to recognize the word. Do this for each word, they claim, and the child will learn to read. This is called “whole-language” reading instruction.

The only problem is that whole-language doesn’t work. Most young children are only able to “memorize” a few hundred relatively simple words. Even an adult’s mind can only memorize at most, a few thousand words.

In contrast, children who learn to sound out the letters of words with phonics can read tens of thousands of words, and eventually read ANY word, because they can sound out each letter in the word and put the sounds together.

Author and education researcher Charles J. Sykes describes whole-language reading instruction in one first-grade classroom in his book “Dumbing Down Our Kids”:

“Reading instruction begins with “pre-reading strategies” in which “children predict what the story is about by looking at the title and the pictures. Background knowledge is activated to get the children thinking about the reading topic.” Then they read the story. If a child does not recognize a word, they are told to “look for clues.”

“The whole-language curriculum gave specific suggestions that children: “Look at the pictures,” ask “What would make sense?” “Look for patterns,” “Look for clues,” and “Skip the word and read ahead and then go back to the word.” Finally, if all this fails, parents/teachers are told, “Tell the child the word.”

During the 1990s, when whole-language instruction was in full force, outraged parents bitterly complained about their children’s deteriorating ability to read. In response, public schools across the country then reverted to their usual tactics - they kept the failed policy but changed its name.

Many public schools today say they now teach kids to read with “balanced reading instruction.” What this means is they combine whole-language instruction with a smattering of phonics. “See,” they can say to parents, “we are now teaching your kids phonics.” The only problem is that too often the “balance” is still about 80 percent whole-language, and 20 percent phonics, if and when the teacher thinks phonics is “needed” in “special cases.”

If you were a doctor and were treating a patient for a serious infection, would you give the patient a “balanced” cure of arsenic and antibiotics? That is the moral and practical status of “balanced” reading instruction where whole-language instruction still predominates, because whole-language is the arsenic of reading-instruction methods. This how it is about education.

Parents, don’t let public-school officials fool you with their glib talk of “balanced reading instruction.” You need to personally investigate how your local school teaches your kids to read. The best thing to do is to test your children’s true reading abilities with an outside, independent testing company. You may be shocked by the outcome of the test. The Resources section of “Public Schools, Public Menace,” lists many such independent reading-testing companies.

Learn more about online education benefit - this can make sense to you.

Developing Pre-reading Skills At An Early Age
By Leslie Tanck

In today’s schools, too many young children struggle with learning to read. As many teachers and parents will attest, reading failure can bring tremendous long-term consequences for children’s self-confidence and motivation to learn as well as for their later school performance. Twenty percent of children in an average classroom struggle tremendously with reading. Reading failure does not start when kids start schools. Reading failure and success can be determined from infancy and early childhood. Parents are a child’s first teacher and it is critical that they know how to teach them and what rich experiences to give them.

The National Reading Panel issued a report in 2000 that responded to a Congressional mandate to help parents, teachers and policymakers identify key skills and methods central to reading achievement. This research is not only for schools and the educational field. Parents should be aware of this research and the important results in order to help their children learn to read.

The Findings of the National Reading Panel Report describe five areas of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Let me stop right now and say that I am a teacher and a parent. If I was not a teacher, I would not know about the five areas of reading, or the National Reading Panel or really anything about teaching children to read. However, I learned these things as a teacher and have used it endlessly as a parent. All parents should know about the five areas of reading instruction. Honestly, reading instruction starts from the first day a child is born. It starts in the songs you sing to your child, the games you play, the stories you read. So, please don’t think that the information in this article is just for teachers. Parents, keep reading to learn how you can help your child develop reading skills from infancy on.

1. Phonemic Awareness:

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds or phonemes. Little games that you can play to help develop phonemic awareness include:

• Making rhymes:

The pig has a (wig)

The sun is (fun)

• Identifying and working with syllables in spoken words:

“I can clap the parents in my name: An-drew.”

• Identifying and working with individual phonemes in spoken words:

“The first sound is sun is /S/.”

My daughter and I like to sing songs about letter sounds. One song we sing is: “/b/ is for Bella, /b/ is for Bella. Every letter makes a sound. /b/ is for Bella.” (we say the sound of b when it is written like this: /b/) We sing this song for Mommy and Daddy and all her other friends. She loves to make requests. Her favorite is “let’s do /g/ for grandma!” I got the idea of this song from similar tunes from Leapfrog toys. They have great toys that give phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Which leads us to the next area of reading- phonics!

2. Phonics:

Phonics instruction teaches children the relationships between written letters and the sounds those letters make.

Toys with letters on it are a great way to introduce this skill at an early age. Again, leap frog has some great toys to help this skill. My daughter knows her letter is B for Bella. She would often get her toys that has letters on it and ask “where’s mommy’s letter?” So, I would point out the M for Mommy. At this time, Bella is 27 months, and can already pick out 12 of the 26 letters. Those letters are all the letters that her closest family members and friends names begin with. It’s not something we sit down and I force her to do, it’s just something she enjoys. Exposing kids to letters at an early age and talking about them and the sounds they make will give them such a great head start. Many kids enter kindergarten without any knowledge of letters or sounds. It helps so much when they come with some background.

3. Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. Fluent readers sound natural as if they are speaking. They read aloud effortlessly and with expression. Readers who have not developed fluency read slowly, word by word and sound choppy. Songs and dance at an early age help children develop early skills for fluency. Repetitive books such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” by Bill Martin Jr., help develop fluency skills. Nursery rhymes can also help with fluency, because they learn to read them in a fluent and rhythmic way.

4. Vocabulary

Vocabulary refers to the words we must know to communicate effectively. Vocabulary is knowing the meaning of words. Vocabulary is also very important to reading comprehension. It is difficult for children to comprehend text when they do not understand the vocabulary in it.

Children learn word meanings indirectly in three ways:

A. They engage daily in oral language:

Talk to your kids about everything. Talk to them about the shapes of objects you see, the color of their shirt, the sound the airplane makes as it flies overhead. Use a variety of words and details as you talk. Take them to the zoo, and point out all the different animals, what the animals are doing, what they are eating, even what country they may be from. Just talk about the world, and your children will have a great vocabulary from listening to you and talking to you.

B. They listen to adults read to them:

Read to your child a lot! I recommend at least a half hour a day. Put books everywhere; their bedroom, the family room, the bathroom, etc. They will pick them up and ask you to read to them. I can’t tell you how much my daughter has learned from the books that we read to her.

C. They read extensively on their own:

Children can read by themselves, before they can actually read words. Just looking through books, looking at the pictures, making up their own stories, or trying to repeat the words that they heard you read, all help in this area.

5. Text Comprehension:

Comprehension is the reason for reading. If a reader can read the words but does not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. At an early age, text comprehension can be developed by asking them questions about books you read. Ask questions such as “What is he/she doing? Why is he doing that? How does he feel? What’s going to happen next?” Also, talk about a book after you read it, and summarize it in words they understand. Comprehension is a skill that will be developed more when they are older and in school, but vocabulary that you give them as a young child will also help incredibly to improve their comprehension.

Well, that’s it folks. -The five areas of reading, and what you can do from infancy to age five to help them be great readers. Remember, you are their first and most important teacher and you give them the building blocks for the rest of their lives. The experiences you provide them with, the songs you sing, the words you speak, and the books you read all shape how well they will learn and develop in school and throughout their life. Most importantly, have fun and enjoy exploring the world with them!

Leslie Tanck has a Bachelors degree in Interpersonal and Organizational Communication, a minor in Pyschology and a Special Education Credential. She has been teaching for four years, and absolutely loves it! She has been married to her husband Jeremy, for four years, has a two year old daughter, Isabella, and another girl on the way. She has a special interest in child development, behavioral and cognitive psychology and overall issues in education. She is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but currently resides in Tulare, California. Leslie has a blog where she posts and writes articles about child development issues. Her blog can be found at http://leslieschildrelatedarticles.blogspot.com/

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Is learning the alphabet song necessary in learning how to read? I don’t think so. But that doesn’t mean it is not important or not helpful. Recently I started encouraging my 7 year old to use the dictionary to look up the meaning of words she doesn’t understand. Searching for a particular word in the dictionary requires the child to know the sequence of the alphabets. You can point out other areas where your child can use their knowledge of alphabetical order such as telephone directories and libraries. Show them that listing words/things in alphabetical order makes searching for them easier.

My son has been doing some Dolch word worksheets from http://enchantedlearning.com and one of the exercises is to put the words in alphabetical order. Slowly I had to teach him to the technique of how to do it.

So, an activity you can do with your child that has mastered the “ABC” song is to rearrange a set of words into alphabetical order. You can start with something simple e.g cat, dog, elephant, mouse, tiger, lion.
Then go on to words with the same first letter e.g. ball, bat, bear, chair, cot.

They say wisdom is knowing how to apply the knowledge that you have. Therefore, a child that knows the ABC is clever but a child that knows how to use that knowledge is wise

Hmm… Talking about the alphabet song, my children really love this Chicka Chicka Boom Boom song.

When I attended Kindermusik classes with my kid a few years ago, the teacher would put up on the walls the words of the music we sang. I thought what a great idea! It’s a great way to make our children’s environment rich with literature. Colourful nursery rhyme posters on the wall will be visually stimulating for our children.
It is a great help for us parents as well. Just imagine having a few spare minutes in between chores or whatever; just sing to baby some nursery rhymes while pointing to the posters. It’s like a “hit and go” activity when you don’t have time to sit down for a good reading session together.
I like this idea too because it allows you to introduce nursery rhymes or action rhymes that you may not be familiar with. Sometimes you find an interesting rhyme someone has shared on the net. Put it up on the wall so you can refer to it as you sing or recite to your children.
My 2nd son who is learning to read often uses these posters to practice his reading. He is familiar with the rhyme and so feels confident when he reads the words.
AND if your DH is like mine (who is not very good with nursery rhymes), these posters will help him get it right

This site called Northumberland Grid for Learning is a great resource for free printable nursery rhyme posters. They also have sequence cards for a follow up activity.

For older kids, you can fill up the wall with their own work by having them color pages of nursery rhymes. DLTK can help you with the coloring pages. First-school.ws is another good resource.

These are some I have on my wall. My children all enjoy doing the one that goes:

“Pat your head
And rub your tummy.
Touch your toes….
And hug your mummy!”

In my efforts to teach KokoD Bahasa Malaysia, I try to get him to master certain phrases at a time. I usually choose phrases that he can immediately use in a daily conversation. The recent activity we had, the focus was on food. The goal was for him to master the phrase “Saya suka makan…” (I like to eat…) and “Saya tak suka makan…” (I don’t like to eat….)

Here is the outline of the activity we did:
Step 1 - I took one of those pamphlets they give out at the supermarkets and cut out pictures of food such as chicken, fish, prawns, vegetable, banana, apple, bread, cake, etc….
Step 2 - Then I wrote on a piece of paper the names of all those food and left spaces for him to glue the pictures to match the names.

Step 3 - After gluing all the pictures, I had him go through the list and put a tick/check for foods he likes to eat and a an ‘X’ for foods he doesn’t like to eat.

Step 4 - Now the oral practice begins. Going through the list once again, he had to say the full sentence of “Saya suka makan…” (for foods that he put a tick/check) and “Saya tak suka makan…” (for foods he put an ‘X’). For example, he don’t like vegetables so he would say “Saya tak suka makan sayur.”
Step 5 - Stick the list up on the wall so he can practice everyday.

This activity was stress free. My son enjoyed it and more importantly, he learned something.