Learning to read.

[rivka]

I feel like Alex has been on the cusp of reading for so long. She's known all the letters and letter sounds for a long time. She's had a handful of sight words, mostly names, since she was two. There have been a number of times that Michael and I have wondered if she can read, because she's displayed unexpected knowledge of text.

I've more or less come to the conclusion that she can't. She has a good memory, as preliterate children often do; she memorizes books and can recite them back after surprisingly few readings. And she has a very good ability to guess a word based on the context and the initial letter. Those two things, combined, often seem like reading. But she doesn't seem to get phonics at all. When asked to sound out a simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word, she has a lot of trouble doing it - or even "saying the word fast" after we've helped her isolate the individual letter sounds.

I've often heard people say that reading is developmental; that it's not just a matter of collecting the right set of skills, but an actual process of cognitive maturation. And that does seem consistent with what we're seeing. Alex has the skills, but it's like the switch in her brain hasn't yet flipped to allow her to pull them together.

There's no hurry, obviously. Teaching reading seems hard, and I don't really want to do it - I've been hoping she'd learn on her own, the way Michael and I did. I let her play on Starfall sometimes when she asks for a computer game, and sometimes when she asks me what something says I'll encourage her to try sounding it out, but I don't feel any strong compulsion to propel her along the path to reading.

Except that lately she's been asking for reading lessons.

I've been writing CVC words on her Magnadoodle and asking her to sound them out. And she's been hitting a wall - not wanting to try, or guessing based on the first letter and getting sulky when encouraged to try again. I'll offer that the reading lesson can be over, and she doesn't want it to be. But the method hasn't been working.

Then yesterday she decided that she wanted to have some turns giving me a reading lesson. She was actually able to construct a few CVC words on her own for me to read, and it seemed much lower-stress for her than trying to decode my words. So I decided I was going about it all wrong.

Today when she wanted a reading lesson, I took the Magnadoodle and drew three pictures: a sun, a car, and a cup. "Pick one of these words, and let's see if you can write it." I gave her the option of having me write the letters or doing it herself, and she decided to do it herself.

In just a couple of minutes, the Magnadoodle read SON CAR CUP. No hesitation, no reluctance to try, no difficulty isolating the letter sounds. She went on to successfully write MAN and PIN in response to additional pictures before getting tired.

Looks like I've had the whole phonics thing backwards. I should've offered her writing lessons.

Comments

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Cool!

[naomikritzer]

Watching my two daughters' processes here has been really fascinating to me.

Molly learned all her letters and all their sounds very young, but couldn't actually string them together into words for a long while after that. If you pointed at the word "letter" she could give you the sound of each letter, but blurring them together into a word -- no way. She liked writing, but was too much of a perfectionist to make up her own spellings; she would sit there and insist that I spell each and every word, slowly, so she could write it.

Then shortly after she turned five, I noticed one day that she appeared to be reading a book. I had her read something out loud to me, and she hated reading out loud because there were words she didn't know and she STILL didn't actually know how to sound stuff out. But with word recognition alone, she made this enormous cognitive leap and was reading full-length middle grade novels like "All of a Kind Family" a few months later. And understanding them. (She did figure out how to sound words out somewhere in the intervening months.)

Kiera showed zero interest in the alphabet until she turned four, at which point she suddenly got interested and learned all the letters and the sounds they made. At some point she started writing, and from the very beginning she would string words together based on their sounds.

At about five and a half, Kiera started seriously sounding stuff out. Unlike Molly, she likes reading out loud. In fact, she has a strong preference for an audience. At first, she had a really hard time with even very simple words because the vowels tripped her up; there are too many possibilities. At some point she grasped that you try out the different possibilities and embrace the one that makes sense. At this point, she can read short, simple books and can, with enough diligence, make headway with early reader chapter books (but not much, it's slow going). Watching Kiera has made me realize why people were so freaked by Molly; when they hear about a kid who came into kindergarten reading, they expect a kid like Kiera, who's reading simple books very slowly. Not a kid who's reading Nancy Drew.

Anyway, re writing lessons, that's apparently part of the Montessori approach to reading -- you teach writing first.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Molly learned all her letters and all their sounds very young, but couldn't actually string them together into words for a long while after that. If you pointed at the word "letter" she could give you the sound of each letter, but blurring them together into a word -- no way. She liked writing, but was too much of a perfectionist to make up her own spellings; she would sit there and insist that I spell each and every word, slowly, so she could write it.

This sounds exactly like Alex. I do wonder what she'd be able to do if she were more willing to risk making a mistake, but she's very reluctant to try things that she thinks might be hard.

I had her read something out loud to me, and she hated reading out loud because there were words she didn't know and she STILL didn't actually know how to sound stuff out.

Huh. So Molly seems to have learned how to read in a non-phonics-based way? That's so interesting. Do you have a sense of what strategies she used? Phonics seem to be alien enough to Alex that I've wondered if she might learn to read a different way, except that I don't know what that way might be. Michael and I were both very early readers who didn't get phonics instruction before we learned to read, but I can't remember ever not being able to read so I have no idea how I learned.

[naomikritzer]

We read to her a lot, and as best as I can tell she learned to read by looking at the page as I read and memorizing what words looked like. Probably her long period of writing by demanding that I spell things out for her was a component here. She did start writing independently in kindergarten and did hit the point of willingness to come up with a spelling on her own.

In reading about the phonics vs. whole language wars, I read something that suggested that whole-language methods were developed based on the fact that many early readers learned to read via word-recognition. FWIW, I remember sounding out books for about a week and then never really sounding things out, ever again. It was like a key turned in a door and I could read.

Alex recently turned four, right? At four, neither Molly nor Kiera could read at ALL. Molly could print some of the letters with marginal legibility and that was it.

Incidentally, I mention this because it might amuse you: we never, ever "hothoused" Molly and I have philosophical objections to the very idea (play is the work! kids learn through play! etc.) Molly, however, does not share our objections -- in fact, she's made it clear she thinks our attitude is lazy and irresponsible -- and a fair amount of Kiera's early literacy is probably the result of Molly persistently playing Kindergarten with her and trying to teach her to read and do math. My kids amuse the heck out of me some days.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"In reading about the phonics vs. whole language wars, I read something that suggested that whole-language methods were developed based on the fact that many early readers learned to read via word-recognition. FWIW, I remember sounding out books for about a week and then never really sounding things out, ever again. It was like a key turned in a door and I could read."

First off, something I think is obvious, but still needs saying: I think "wars" of that nature are silly, mostly because humans are so variable that it's tough for there to be any "one best way."

But, as someone who started learning Mandarin 10 weeks ago, phonics strikes me as remarkably culture-centric. Such a thing is only possible if one's native language uses a phonetic alphabet in the first place. For a good chunk of the world, that's not an option. Yet, strangely, they manage to read anyway. :)

As for my own experience (here comes the anecdotal tie-in), the standard story in my family is I taught myself to read at about age two. Apparently the big push came from a boomlet in TV commercials at the time that used text lines which were read out loud in voice-over. I was reading Time magazine by age six or so -- a great-aunt commented on how even the pictures alone in Time could entertain someone my age, and my mom had me read to her to show it wasn't the pictures. Both mom and dad were teachers, and taught what was then (late 1960s) called "see-and-say," which googling implies is the "whole language" school.

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

...and noticing what the TV commercials were doing is what led to Sesame Street.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

I learned the same way you two did, and I still mispronounce things - I'm not the best decoder in some ways, and I also got a lot of words in my head the wrong way before I really encountered them out loud. I also did a three-year stint in reading support and special ed so I can say with some experience (if not really expertise) that a) fluent readers don't use phonics to actually read - it's way too slow. Phonics is a means to an end and an approach for new words; it's definitely not the end. And b) in my maybe not so humble opinion, while phonics seems to work for more kids than it doesn't, there were a significant percentage of kids I worked with that simply did not learn to read via phonics. They built up a core sight vocabulary by learning the whole words, either just via being read to or via visual dictionaries and that kind of thing, and then once they had acquired enough sight vocab, that would propel them over into actually reading. And really if you are paying attention most kids eventually use a combination of the two to tip over anyway. It's pretty fascinating stuff. Montessori teaches phonics in part by writing, before/alongside decoding.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I've been having a lot of discussions with torontoteacher (who doesn't actually post on her LJ) about this. She teaches Reading Recovery, and did a Master's in something to do with teaching reading. El Capitano is very enamoured of getting the WML to sound things out, even when the things are not very phonetic. Thing is, the sounding-out tool isn't always the best one, because reading is what torontoteacher calls "a meaning-making process." We don't learn to read letters, really, and we don't actually learn to read words, per se. We learn to read for meaning. So the letters and the words are building blocks for meaning.

Part of reading is learning to sound out words, but the jump for sounder-outer kids comes when they can connect the word they've sounded out to one they know. So you can get them to sound out "cup" or "cat," for example, because they're phonetically simple, but more because the kids can then connect those simple sounds to something they know. They may have less success sounding out something like "bellow," even if they can tell it ought to sound like "yellow," if they've never heard the word "bellow" before—they've no meaning to connect it to. Or they may sound out "bellow," but because it means nothing to them, they won't really be reading it.

Guessing from first-and-last letters and context are part of the process of learning to read, and are among the ways we build meaning. So's plain old memory: once we've encountered a word often enough, we just remember it. Sounding things out is also a cool tool, except that parents who can remember only being told to sound things out tend to belabour it, and it's not as universally useful as we sometimes think.

[naomikritzer]

Oh YEAH. This drives me crazy when I'm working with the slow readers in my daughter's class as a volunteer. The teacher has me sit and listen to kids read, and there is this particular series of phonics books that she likes them to work through. The problem is that the books will focus on the sound, and on short, simple words, to the exclusion of useful meaning. So for instance, they'll use the word "pal" instead of "friend." Most of the first graders I've worked with have clearly been baffled by the word "pal." It's not really in common usage among kids right now. Even worse was "nab" instead of "grab" because god forbid we have a blended consonant in that book. The word "nab" was central to that particular story (I'm using the word "story" really loosely here) so the kid's unfamiliarity with the word was a really big issue.

They're also lame books. And they are full of white children, whereas my daughter's school is extremely diverse. Unless she insists I usually pick a different collection of easy readers to have the kids practice on.

What I would really love to see: a graphic novel series that have good stories, a truly diverse cast, and a mostly simple vocabulary but augmented with words that are both reasonably meaty and yet not too hard to sound out when they're unfamiliar, so that kids could practice both their sight reading and their decoding skills. And they'd WANT to because these books would actually be GOOD.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"They're also lame books. And they are full of white children, whereas my daughter's school is extremely diverse. Unless she insists I usually pick a different collection of easy readers to have the kids practice on."

Daniel Handler, who transcribes the Lemony Snicket books {cough}, had an interview on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge where he mentions how crummy children's books are. I wrote about it (http://notthatkindofoperation.blogspot.com/2007/09/lemony-snickets-insight-to-unfortunate.html) in my business blog, and the strange connection to business writing more generally.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Have you read Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook? He's an eloquent advocate of reading vivid, interesting books to kids rather than using leveled phonics readers. He points out that, first of all, it's hard to learn to read if you haven't been exposed to a wide vocabulary and a lot of good examples of how sentences are put together. And second, kids who have mainly encountered reading via phonics readers have no motivation to learn to read. Because that stuff is BORING.

I think it is important for kids to learn phonic decoding skills, but you need to be very careful that you provide them with opportunities to experience the forest, not just an endless series of trees.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

My (layman parent's) understanding of reading teaching in the schools, as I've seen it, is that they do both in many places. My daughter is exposed to both old-school phonics and reading, and whole-language, writing-first instruction. Her 'reading switch' hasn't flipped yet, either, but she's a much more confident and fluid writer (she can't spell for beans, but English is ridiculous for that) than reader.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't know that writing-first was a "whole language" technique. I was still thinking of it as phonics because you're stringing letter sounds together to make words.

I think you're right, and most places do combine the two.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I think I think of writing-first as whole-language because they emphasize the word, and not getting the spelling at all right. Yes, you need to have some idea of the sounds of the letters, but in practice things are spelled in completely unexpected ways.

Another fun whole-language technique that Casper likes is learning sight-words. In her class they called them "popcorn words" and "buttered" them with yellow crayon in books and handouts (yellow removable highlighter tape in books). Little, common words, like he, she, is, if, red, blue. They did some fun exercises cutting popcorn words out of old magazines (ads, mostly) and making a collage.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

That's interesting about the writing lessons--I should try that. E. has sporadic interest in learning to read. We'll be in a bookstore and he'll volunteer, "Is that book about running?" because he sees the word "run." But he doesn't like structured attempts to teach him at all. If he could choose, he would certainly pick the unschooling approach to learning. And he would definitely like trying to teach me to read. One of my friends suggested that he would be a school proctor.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Wow. I don't remember *not* reading - my dad tells me I was reading aloud by the time I was three - but writing came a lot more slowly to me.

Mary took up reading on her own. Megan wasn't interested until she started school. Tommy and Danny *still* don't enjoy reading but both of them write well. Aren't brains fascinating?

[windypoint.livejournal.com]

My experience it that bright kids with a rich intellectual life of their own can take a little longer. The further ahead they are of the material they are being given to read, the less rewarding they find reading. There is sort of a tipping point, at which a kid can read well enough that he or she is capable of reading things that make him or her want to read... once you reach that point a kid will be fine but until you reach that point, it is all hard slog.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The further ahead they are of the material they are being given to read, the less rewarding they find reading.

That's an interesting observation. I did feel like Alex seemed more engaged in trying to decode text (wanting me to "show the words" when I read, for instance) back when we were reading simpler books. Then our reading material got more complex and her attention to the written text declined.

[treadpath.livejournal.com]

I have nothing worthwhile to contribute except an early reading tv show recommendation. I think Word World on PBS is the shizz. I've noticed that the few words Tamsin can spell, and Alex is WAAAAY beyond Tamsin in reading and writing so what the heck do I know, are all related to that show. Also, I find it hilarious. Maybe I should just watch it and leave everybody alone. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.

[lissamc.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion! It has been long enough now that I don't remember exactly the process my kids learned by. But I remember a few things I did. I got a label maker, and helped the kids stick word labels around their room. (Things like 'door', 'bed', etc. .) I also got a TV with closed captioning. When they could have on a show, I made sure the closed captioning was also on, so they could see the written words that went with the speech. I don't know how much they paid attention, but I figured it couldn't hurt. I also read to them a lot, and let them read to me when they chose. And we have been making weekly library trips for as long as they can remember.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I got a label maker, and helped the kids stick word labels around their room. (Things like 'door', 'bed', etc. .)

You know, I've heard of other people doing this, and Alex would probably love it. I've shied away from anything that seems too much like I AM TEACHING YOU TO READ NOW, but I should probably examine why I feel that way and whether it's justified.

[tea-dragon.livejournal.com]

A label maker sounds like a good idea- if we'd had one when Sarah was six she might not have labeled her dresser drawers with red oil crayon using sound spelling!

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I was a late reader for my peer group. I firmly remember being one of the few not reading at all, and then reading slowly and laboriously (phonically), and hating the effort it took to get through a picture book. Then the switch flipped, and over the winter break went from that to complaining about reading aloud with my teacher because saying the words out loud slowed me down. To this day, I'm a fast and constant reader.

I think you're doing exactly the right thing, and one day soon that switch is going to flip, and you're going to have major book-supply problems.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

For me, it was a combination of learning letters one-at-a-time, plus phonics for sounding out, with a lot of single-word recognition, until suddenly the Magic Day (http://almeda.livejournal.com/310832.html) came, and POW, I could read Judy Blume.

At 3.

[platypus]

It's interesting that she's so reluctant to make mistakes -- I was, too, when I was a kid, and to some extent I still am. I'll try anything if nobody's looking, but any audience, however sympathetic and nonjudgmental, makes me reluctant to venture anything I'm not certain about. I used to think I developed that tendency because my older brother made fun of me on the occasions when I was wrong, but clearly that's not an issue here.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

To me, that seems like a manifestation of perfectionism which is very common in gifted children. You don't want to let anyone catch you making a mistake. See the Table of Possible Problems That May be Associated with Characteristic Strengths of Gifted Children.

There's quite a lot of other articles on the website but I haven't read them all.

Academic article on writing first

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

This past semester, I took a class called Writing in Education. One of our assignments was to read the article below and reflect on it. One of the major things in the article is that when children write what they want to say, reading that writing becomes meaningful, while words written by the mysterious "they" who write textbooks is much less so.

Citation:

Elbow, Peter. “Writing First.” Educational Leadership. Oct. 2004: 8-13.

My summary of the article:

In “Writing First,” Peter Elbow argues that writing should come before reading. Children can already write pretty much any word they can say, spelling notwithstanding. Conversely, children can only read those words that they can already sound out or recognize on sight. When they read what they have written, they make a connection between their writing and the act of reading. Older students will benefit from speculation about new ideas before reading about them.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I remember, a long time ago, an article in ASF, and talking it over with a student teacher who had a great ass (and other bits).

Summary: phonics certainly isn't for everyone, though something very like it is a useful tool for dealing with unfamiliar words. Trouble is, English is a language with spelling/phoneme instances that allow you to pronounce "ghoti" as "fish". And you don't have to deal with a class of different kids.

Only problem is that Alex is going to have to cope with teachers. soon enough.

[piqueen.livejournal.com]

I don't think I learnt to read from phonics because I can remember trying to 'fake' sound things out after having read them. My parents tell me that I went from not interest to reading quite fluently very quickly so I think it must have been the whole word thing I was doing. Interestingly as an adult I'm very poor at working out how to pronounce new words but have no difficulty reading them and knowing what they mean, sometimes for years, I just sound stupid if I have to read out a passage containing them out loud.

[ailbhe]

My mother remembers learning to read using phonics (after years of being taught with whole language look-and-memorise stuff) when she was seven; I learned to read at three or so, and could write my name and a few simple words shortly afterwards. Linnea has no interest in reading any more, though still shows that she can do it occasionally, in a way she finds too limited to be useful, but she is extremely interested in learning to write. I guess she thinks she has things to say.

My infant mispronunciations are still family staples. FALSE with A as in CAT was one. My mother remembers my-zulled (misled).

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I could read long before I went to school, I don't remember learning and neither does anyone else -- I asked my aunt when Z was at that stage, and she quite seriously claimed that I'd always been able to read.

However, Z was at the stage you say Alex is at for ages and ages, he had all the skills but he couldn't actually read, and then one day quite suddenly as if by magic while we were walking down the hill to town, he could read. I think it really is a cognitive development thing you can't do until you grow that bit of brain, and I had that early and he didn't until he was five.

(We were walking down the hill, and at the top of the hill he couldn't read, and at the bottom the world was suddenly full of information, signs and shop names, some of them quite hard, like "G. Patel, Chemist" and "Halliburton's Emporium" and he could read them the same as I could. I didn't do anything to catalyse this, I was just walking down the hill, same as every time.)

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, writing makes sense as a way to connect with reading; certainly more so than translating written words into speech is.

I have no idea how I learned to read, but whatever switch it was flipped very early; I'm told I was reading when I was two, and I definitely find written English to be as much my native language as spoken English.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

I don't remember learning to read. Apparently my mother would tell the story of when I started reading at age 3 to *other* people, but not me. Parents can be weird, no? :) I suspect from what got relayed back to me that I instinctively applied the "memorize words" technique to the books I was already familiar with and just ran with it from there. I was already *speed-reading* once I got to 1st grade - I remember distinctly that I had to keep two fingers in any book we were using for "read out loud" practice: one marking where the class was, and a farther one where I had gotten to.

By the time we got to phonics in 2nd grade, it was a semi-useful tool but as others have mentioned, English isn't exactly the most phonics-friendly tongue. (The fact that they started teaching us French at that same time may or may not have helped. My pronunciation of "poem" has all sorts of idiosyncracies...)

And FWIW, I still have trouble reading out loud -- because my eyes get way ahead of my mouth almost immediately. Basically, I can't slow my video input down enough for my audio output to keep up. (I think a similar factor is driving my dislike of the drift of online news content presentation from text to video. I can read a lot faster than I can listen -- and if the input is too little and/or slow, I get bored and tune out.)

[tea-dragon.livejournal.com]

Great discussion!

I must have been a whole word reader by kindergarten. I remember being totally annoyed by the Dick and Jane books (boring AND too easy) as well as books where all the multi-syllable words were replaced by pictures. Give me an interesting picture book with difficult words any day!

I also remember lists of CVC spelling words that we were to memorize in first grade. We were supposed to write a sentence for each one, and my teacher let me put as many of the words into one sentence as I could. It was a really fun game, (I think my top score was about 21) but probably contributed to my tendency to write run-on sentences!

I think the schools have come a long way since then. In Sarah's school the kid's start writing in kindergarten, with no regard to spelling, and illustrate each page themselves. Formal spelling isn't taught until 2nd grade. During free reading time the kids choose their own books so everyone is reading real books at their own level.

[redbird]

That is delightful.

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

I don't remember not reading, and remember hardly any "young kids' books" (the only one that stands out in my mind is The Monster at the End of This Book, starring Grover). I would get bored very quickly with the reading texts in class.

IANA developmental expert, but something I suspect is going on lies in the different ways we process words internally. Feynman describes an experiment with a fellow frat member on how reliably they could tell how much time had passed, where they worked out that they processed counting differently — one visualized a tape with numbers running past, the other "heard" the numbers; this affected what they could do without disrupting the mental count.

When I read, I hear the voices in my mind (when I read LJ, I even usually hear the specific voices, if I've met the author in person). Since I don't remember not reading, I don't know how this would have affected how I learned, but the general idea is that how kids process words internally determines what the best way to teach them is.

This is precisely why one-system-fits-all schools of thought really tick me off. (My perception of the "war" is that phonics hardliners demand that only phonics be taught, while the whole-language method they mock is generally being used as one tool in a box that also includes phonics. But my perception has little personal experience involved (I have no children), and may be mistaken.)