Don't Forget Dr. Seuss

"Roses are red, violets are blue...."  I'm pretty sure we all know that little poem.  But somewhere along the line, it seems like many of our children have forgotten how to rhyme.

It seems that, more often than not, the students who come to me for extra reading support do not know how to rhyme.  So, why is this important?  Understanding onset (the initial consonant or consonant blend of a word) and rime (the vowel and the consonants that follow it) is a critical skill in developing phonological awareness, one of the foundations of reading.  Children do not learn to read words until they first learn to pull apart the individual sounds in a word.  Pull them apart first to get the concept, then learn how to put them back together.

So, what has happened to rhyming?  I have a theory that is, in no way, research-based; just based upon my own observations.  It seems to me that perhaps we are such a "sophisticated" society these days, that we don't need to worry about things like reading Dr. Seuss to our children.  Hop on Pop is cliche; we've all read it a million times.  But have our children?  Books like that are perfect for early readers...or even pre-readers.  Children love books that are predictable and repetitive.  They can learn to "read" them, or at least parts of the books, by themselves.  In doing so, they begin to understand our alphabetic system.  Even more importantly, they learn to play with words by changing the beginning sounds.  Change the /h/ in "hop" to /p/ and you have "pop".  Thus we have the beginnings of onset and rime.

As the child eagerly fills in the words that you leave out when you are reading and come up with other rhyming words that could fit in that same spot, they learn how much fun they can have with reading.  A love for reading will lead to a desire to read more, which will ultimately lead to fluent reading.  In the words of Dr. Seuss, from I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

Misty

Your Baby Can Read--But Why?

As reported by ABC News, "Your Baby Can Read" has shut their doors in light of a possible Federal Trade Commission investigation over false claims.  This is a company that preyed on parents; those from a lower socio-economic status who desperately wanted to give their children a head start, those who wanted to brag about their babies' skills, and those who just believed the company's claims.   At $200 a pop, they purportedly made a fortune off of these parents.

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommend NO screen time for children under the age of two.  However, if parents followed the instructions of the Your Baby Can Read program, their children would be subjected to as much as 200 hours of screen time in their first two years of life through this program alone.  

Screen time issues aside, is the program valuable?  Yes, an infant can be trained to mimic words that they see printed.  But does this qualify as reading?  I can watch "Dora the Explorer" with my Goddaughter and learn to greet people with "hola".  But does that mean that I can speak Spanish?  Absolutely not.  It's the same idea.  Providing a response to a few words in isolation doesn't make a child a reader any more than Dora makes me a Spanish-speaker.

Reading is  a complicated process that combines aspects of memorization with decoding skills.  An early program that focuses solely on memorization can establish some bad habits in young children.  Many of my reading students have great difficulty with the vowel sounds in words; they often just skip over the letter and inserting whatever vowel sound seems right to them.  This is because they see the word as one whole piece rather than individual sounds that combine to make a word.  Memorization is simply not an effective way to learn to read.

The other, even more basic piece of all of this is:  Why would we want our children sitting in front of television screens when we could be snuggling with them and reading to them?  THIS is how we establish pre-reading skills.  We show children how wonderful it is to read and show them the basics of the alphabetic principle--we read from top to bottom, left to right, letters make distinct sounds that combine to form words, and print represents meaning.  I would much rather my child learn that from warm interactions with me than from my television set.

Misty

Pre-Reading Skills: Teaching Beginning Sounds

Play is a very important aspect of a child's learning.  The same idea applies in developing pre-reading skills.

Some children see a word as a whole rather than as individual letters (or sounds) that combine to form a word.  This makes it difficult to learn to read.  For example, a child may read the word "dug" as "dog" because the words look so similar and the child doesn't notice the difference.

We can help children develop the skills that they need to be able to read by playing language games with them. 

• "My name starts with /m/ (the sound of "m").  Who else's name starts with /m/?"   Move on to other sounds.
• "I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a toothbrush."  Next person--"I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a turtle."  Continue taking turns naming things that start with the same letter until someone has difficulty with the task.  Choose a different letter and start again.
• "We're going to make 'c' soup."  Put soup pot in middle of circle and have a child start stirring it.  Other children come up and pretend to put something in the soup that starts with the target letter.  "I'm putting corn in the soup."  "I'm putting carrots in the soup."  Children can be silly with their ingredients if they want--"I'm putting a camera in the soup."
• Word sort--provide children with pictures that start with one of two different target sounds.  (The target sounds should not be similar--don't use /m/ and /n/ together.)  Children name each picture and sort them into piles of words starting with the same sounds.  For example--one pile will have a picture of a banana, a boat, and a bone, while the other pile will have a picture of a man, a map, and a mop.

Making language fun is one way to help children more readily develop pre-reading skills.  

Misty

Image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

Tools for Learning

Last week I talked about developing independent learners by instilling the joy and excitement of learning in each child.  Once we get those children interested in learning, we need to make sure that we provide them with the basic tools of learning.

Most people recognize reading, writing and arithmetic as the basic tools of learning; with those basics, we can learn just about anything.  But the tools I'm talking about are even more basic than these.  We need to teach children how to be life-long learners.

One of the first tools we need to give children is perseverance.  My husband's favorite quote, from his father, is "Nothing hard is ever easy."  We want to make things as easy as we can for children, but the reality is that some things will always be difficult.  We need to teach them this, but also show them that, through perseverance and hard work, they can accomplish whatever they set out to do.

Allowing, and encouraging, the children to work with partners or groups will help them to start developing those collaboration skills that are so important in most American businesses these days.  Most employers are looking for the complete package employee--someone who not only has content knowledge and skills, but have emotional intelligence, social skills, and the ability to work collaboratively.  

Children are curious.  We have to encourage and nurture that curiosity by giving children a safe environment in which to explore; not just physically safe, but emotionally safe as well.  They need to understand that we all make mistakes, but those very mistakes are what help us to learn.  In modeling acceptance of mistakes (and the ability to admit our own mistakes), we can also help those children to develop empathy for one another.  In demonstrating an ability to "roll with the punches" when things don't go as we planned, we can teach the children to do the same.  

With these tools in their toolboxes (perseverance, collaborative skills, emotional intelligence, social skills, curiosity, empathy, flexibility, and the ability to accept mistakes), children are prepared to tackle whatever comes their way and to start taking responsibility for their own learning.

Misty

Inspiring Independent Learners

Happy Independence Day!

As an educator, my ultimate goal is to develop independent learners; children who are self-motivated and responsible for their own learning.  To do this, I need to first instill the joy and excitement of learning in each child.  By partnering with the parents of each child, we can all maximize our efforts.

We must make sure that what we teach children is, first of all, developmentally appropriate.  Although we (or the school system) may have ideas of what we would like a child to accomplish, if he is not developmentally ready for it, it's simply not going to happen.  We need to have reasonable expectations. 

We must make sure that what we are trying to teach is relevant and interesting to the children.  Talking to my students about a warm summer rain is pretty difficult because in Northern California, it doesn't rain in the summer.  All of our rain is from about November to March, so it is cool.  Some of the students find it interesting to think about a warm rain, but discussions about puddle-hopping aren't really relevant.  Similarly, we've all met the 4 or 5-year-old child that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about dinosaurs.  That's because that child has a passion for dinosaurs; he or she WANTS to learn everything about them.  When children have choices about what they learn, they are much more engaged and start to learn that ever-important lesson of taking ownership of their own learning.

Children are active (in case you hadn't noticed!).  Providing them with opportunities for active learning will be much more successful than expecting them to sit back and simply observe what you are teaching them.  Children are also inquisitive by nature, so encouraging them to develop their own ideas, experiment, and even take some "safe" risks will help them to learn to step outside of their comfort zones. 

The environment that we create is also very important in instilling the joy of learning in a child.  The physical environment must be safe, so that a child can take those risks.  It must also be appealing so that the child will want to be there and will be intrigued by the materials that we provide.  Finally, the environment we establish must be emotionally safe, where the child feels safe to explore interests, work with friends, and branch out to try new things.

Misty

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net