Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  Reading with Your Child

  You have been reading to your child for years. As she starts to learn to decode, you also begin to read with her. The idea is that she reads with some support from you. The support you offer takes two forms: you remind her how to sound out words when she needs help, and you provide emotional support and enthusiasm. One-on-one practice is quite valuable at this stage of learning, but teachers have too many students to allow much of it in the classroom.

  Choosing the Right Book

  The right book depends on your child’s reading level, of course. Ideally, you’d like reading materials that include only letter-sound combinations he already knows. As he learns new letter-sound combinations, the books he reads include those as well. This is another reason it pays to use a phonics program that teaches letter-sound pairings in order of frequency. There are book sets (e.g., The Bob Books) that respect this order, so your child sees only words that he ought to be able to read. Your best bet is to ask your child’s teacher for recommendations because she knows how far your child has progressed.

  Lots of children have a favorite book that they want to read again and again. Often it’s one they have listened to so many times that they have memorized it, and so when they “read” it to you, you can tell they are pretty much reciting. It’s not that they are dodging the harder work of decoding. Rather, they are enjoying a glimpse of what it’s like to truly read, and that’s a powerful motivator. So about half the time my youngest asked, I’d listen to her “read” Go Dog, Go (mercifully, the short version), and half the time I’d say, “Oh, I love that one too. But you read me that one yesterday. Let’s pick another book today.”

  Shoot for at least one session each day, and make it brief—no more than five or ten minutes. That may not sound like much, but short bouts of practice can really pay off if they occur regularly. A little frustration during these sessions is normal, but if your child is having a bad day, just say something like, “That was great, but do you think maybe we’re done?” (figure 5.5). Don’t feel that you have to finish a book you’ve started. Of course, if he asks to keep reading, you should continue. But decoding is demanding when you are first learning, and the idea is that this process be fun. Finish the session by smiling and saying, “Thanks! I’m already looking forward to next time” or something similarly upbeat.

  Figure 5.5. Reading practice is taxing. To maximize the chances that your child’s attitude stays upbeat, try to pick a time for reading practice when he’s least likely to be tired or hungry.

  Source: © Ivanna Buldakova—Fotolia.com

  Providing Feedback

  Feedback is an important part of any learning process, and that’s what you’re there for. At the same time, feedback can be distracting. So I suggest you talk as little as possible. The child needs to hear her own voice, not yours. You want to cheer her on and acknowledge when she’s doing well—do that by smiling and nodding, not by saying, “Awesome!” or “Right!” For the same reason, don’t initiate conversations about the story. That’s just the opposite of what you do when you’re reading aloud. Learning to decode is occupying all of your child’s attention, and she can’t think about two things at once. Switching back and forth between decoding and meaning is not going to help. But of course, you should (briefly) answer questions your child asks and acknowledge comments she makes.

  If your child gets stuck on a word, don’t be too quick to tell her what it is. (Likewise, when she’s writing and asks how a word is spelled, she should make her best guess before you provide support.) And don’t suggest that she guess what word makes sense. You’re practicing decoding. In fact, most kids do a lot of guessing without your suggesting it because it’s a strategy that has worked fairly well with very simple books. You’re working toward the more general skill that will carry her through the complicated stuff. So when your child guesses, just smile and say, “Sound it out,” even if she has guessed right.

  Cover part of the word so all she can see is the part that’s giving her trouble. If she’s totally stumped, cover all but the initial letter (or two-letter combination, as appropriate). If she still needs help, remind her of the relevant rule: “Right. That letter usually says AW, but when there are two together, they say something else.” The same strategies apply if your child reads a word incorrectly. Don’t just blurt out a correction. Say “oops” or something else brief, and point to the missed word. See if she gets it. If not, offer support (figure 5.6).

  Figure 5.6. Don’t be an auto-correct. Which way are you more likely to learn the correct spelling of “egregious”: You notice that auto-correct fixes it for you, or you’re told that the spelling is wrong and you try again to spell it correctly? When your child reads a word incorrectly, don’t just say the word: let him take another try.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  Sometimes kids make a lot of mistakes because they try to read faster than they are really able. Other times they read excruciatingly slowly in an effort to avoid all mistakes. As in any other mental activity, speed and accuracy can be traded. There’s no reason not to encourage your child to speed up or slow down a bit. Again, this can be done mostly with gentle gesture and minimal talking.

  Dealing with Frustration

  You’ll note that I keep mentioning that you should smile, you should be upbeat, and so on. For me (and for many other parents I’ve spoken with), there were moments when listening to my kids read was the kind of sweet, parent-child activity I had imagined. And though I foresaw the moments that my child would be frustrated, I didn’t foresee that I would be. My child would stop to comment on complete irrelevancies. I would suggest five times that she read faster, and she would ignore me. I would remind her of the sound “ou” makes, and she would forget on the very next word. There are going to be frustrating moments, but it’s essential that you don’t show that it’s getting to you. If the interaction is negative, that emotion may rub off on reading, but even if it doesn’t, it’s going to make your child reluctant to partner with you for reading.

  I can offer four suggestions if you find yourself frustrated. First, the habit of not talking much is not only good for your child (so she hears mostly her own voice, reading) but also good for maintaining your composure when you’re frustrated. Second, when you do speak, you can usually find an intonation other than frustration that carries your message in a positive way. When my youngest would look to me for help on the same word three times in sixty seconds, my inclination was to shout, “You KNOW this one.” I trained myself to say, “You know this one,” with the intonation of, “You sly dog.” I probably should have said nothing, but at least I used a positive tone. Third, remind yourself that the whole session is only five or ten minutes. Fourth, if you find that you just can’t keep it together, quit. Ask your child to read with you later. Grinding through the process gives a little practice in decoding, but it carries too high a cost in motivation.

  Teaching Your Child

  You may wonder whether reading with your child for one or two brief sessions each day is enough. How about honest-to-goodness instruction, not just practice?

  Let’s start with the easy case. If you never thought about phonological awareness before reading this book and now realize that your six-year-old is not very good at hearing individual speech sounds, by all means, work on it. Phonological awareness exercises really are silly fun, and it’s pretty hard to do them incorrectly, so play the games described in chapter 2, as well as any others that his teacher recommends.

  What about decoding? Given that I emphasized the importance of phonics instruction earlier in this chapter, you might think I’d say, “Someone has to provide systematic phonics instruction, and if the teacher doesn’t do it, you’ll have to.” But that’s not what I’m going to say.

  There are very few classrooms in the United States with no phonics instruction. First, teachers know the research literature and they know that phonics instruction is important. Second, many school districts (or states)
mandate that kids take tests that tap their knowledge of phonics. Third, the reason I’m so strong on phonics is not that it’s impossible to learn to read without it. It’s that systematic phonics instruction maximizes the odds that everyone in the class will learn to read. Some kids—not many, but some—really do learn with very little instruction of any sort. Others learn with relatively modest support. So sure, if you have a choice, I would urge that your child be in a classroom that teaches phonics systematically. But you may not have that choice. What if phonics instruction seems kind of light? Then what?

  I encourage you to be very cautious about providing reading instruction at home. There are studies showing that such teaching can help children learn to read, but in these studies, parents are trained in specific techniques by the researchers. If you’re not trained by researchers (or your child’s teacher), you’re either going to go with your gut instincts about how to teach (which is dicey) or you’ll choose one of the many products out there for parents to work on phonics with their kids. Many of these products are not sound in how they approach reading instruction, and most are terribly boring. As one reading specialist put it to me, “Phonics worksheets, disguised as computer apps and imposed by parents on their kids, are probably the number one destroyer of reading motivation.” I see reading motivation as fragile and as difficult to bring back once it’s gone. The proper role for a parent is enthusiastic cheerleader and good model of reading, not assigner of reading chores.

  That said, if your child is really having trouble learning to decode—I mean really having trouble—then I completely reverse my advice. You need to be sure that your child is getting explicit phonics instruction. That, of course, raises the question of what constitutes good progress in learning to read.

  When to Be Concerned

  Some typical rules of thumb for an American kindergarten might be:

  By Halloween, know the letters.

  By Christmas, read some regular three-letter words.

  By spring break, read most three-letter words.

  By year’s end, read some words with more complex blends.

  But this rule of thumb really works only if it’s consistent with what’s being taught. As I was writing this chapter, I heard about a kindergarten classroom in which the teacher introduced four letters in the first nine weeks. That sounds like a pretty slow pace to me, but of course I don’t know what else the kids were doing. I’ve said before I think that many American schools spend too much time on English language arts in the early elementary grades at the expense of nearly all other subjects. So if my child were in a classroom with a slow reading pace but with terrific math, science, history, music, and art, personally, I wouldn’t complain.

  •••••••••••••

  As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, we need to attend to all three components of reading—decoding, comprehension, and motivation—at all ages. It’s easy to forget about comprehension as kids are learning to decode, but it’s vital that we don’t. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to the continued building of knowledge during the early elementary years.

  Keeping It Simple Summary

  At School

  Systematic phonics instruction

  Children’s literature

  Opportunities to write, speak, and listen, as well as read

  At Home

  Have your child read to you, ideally every day, for brief (five- or ten-minute) sessions.

  Resist the urge to engage in reading instruction unless you have reason to believe you know what you’re doing.

  Monitor that your child is making reasonable reading progress.

  Notes

  “Hide from them all the ABCs.”: Quoted in Manguel (1996, p. 79).

  “‘skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions’”: Mann (1841).

  “still put forward today by some theorists”: Goodman (1996).

  “no more than fifty-five hundred years old”: Robinson (2007).

  “blue-ribbon panels of scientists”: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000); Rose (2006); EU High Level Group of Experts on Literacy (2012).

  “US scientific organizations”: National Research Council (1998); Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, and Seidenberg (2001).

  “depending on what the child knows when reading instruction begins”: Jeynes and Littell (2000); Sonnenschein, Stapleton, and Benson (2009); Stahl and Miller (1989).

  “so was born ‘balanced literacy’”: Fountas and Pinnell (1996); Pressley (2002).

  “a handbook for teachers published by the New York City Department of Education”: Stabiner, Chasin, and Haver (2003).

  “a lot of variation in what happened in their classrooms”: Bingham and Hall-Kenyon (2013).

  “different kids learn better from different activities”: Connor, Morrison, and Katch (2004); Connor, Morrison, and Petrella (2004).

  “most early elementary teachers are using some version of balanced literacy”: Xue and Meisels (2004).

  “allot scant time to phonics instruction”: Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, and Clifton (2012).

  “other research that kids (and adults) can’t focus on two things at a time”: Pashler (1999).

  “technology has a modest positive effect on reading outcomes”: Cheung and Slavin (2011).

  “the modest effect is actually typical for educational technology interventions”: Hattie (2009); Tamim, Bernard, Borokhovski, Abrami, and Schmid (2011).

  “the student’s relationship with the teacher, a factor known to be important in early reading”: Mashburn et al. (2008).

  “There are studies showing that such teaching can help children learn to read”: Senechal and Young (2008).

  aAlthough I know it will make some theoreticians bristle, I’m using the terms “whole word” and “whole language” interchangeably. They are not identical, but both suggest that minimal phonics instruction is necessary, so they are much more alike than different.

  Chapter 6

  Banking Knowledge for the Future

  When a child is learning to decode, we obviously expect little by way of reading comprehension. But by grade 3 or so, we start to expect that students can comprehend longer, more complex texts and that they will branch out into reading texts from genres other than stories. At home and at school, they may be exposed to letters, newspaper articles, and expository text like encyclopedia entries. Kids are still not asked to work with the texts in a serious way (e.g., to use them in research)—that won’t come until the upper elementary years. But once children can decode reliably, the expectations for comprehension begin to increase.

  Understanding Longer Texts

  We begin by considering what’s required to understand longer texts. This entails not just connecting sentences, as I discussed in chapter 1, but the way that readers connect many ideas into something bigger. After that, we’ll consider how schools can support the development of this more challenging comprehension task.

  Capturing Big Ideas

  Reading comprehension begins when the reader extracts ideas from the sentences he reads. Then he connects ideas that are about the same thing (“The tissues are on the desk. The tissues are white.”) or ideas that are causally related (“The stranger tapped on the window. The dog barked.”). The result of making these connections is a network of related ideas, analogous to a social network. Imagine a web of connections that vary in strength.

  That’s a good start at explaining reading comprehension, but it’s not enough. Consider this text:

  Sally decided to go to the big market downtown. The downtown area had recently been renovated. The market included a large deli. The deli man really liked capicola ham. The deli man’s wife wants a new car but she can’t decide what type to get. The bank where she applied for a loan has gold carpeting.

  If understanding were merely a matter of connecting ideas into a network—about-the-same-thing connections and causal connections—this passage would not seem strange. But it
does, and it’s not hard to describe why. There’s no big picture. Each idea can be connected to another, but there’s no overall idea of what the paragraph is about.

  Somehow readers need to represent in memory the big picture of what they read. One of the seminal experiments on how readers meet this challenge used very brief text similar to this one: “Two birds sat on a branch. An open birdcage sat on the ground beneath them.” Now suppose I asked you, “Was the branch above the birdcage?” If you had nothing but the specific sentences in your memory, you could answer that question by combining what you were told with some logical inferences, like this:

  I was told the birds are above the branch.

  Therefore, the branch is below the birds.

  I was told the birdcage is beneath the birds, on the ground.

  By transitive inference, the birdcage must be below the branch.

  Therefore, the branch must be above the birdcage.

  Our intuition tells us that we don’t answer the question that way, and research supports that intuition. But what choice is there but to answer the question based on what you read?