What can parents do to help
their child learn to read?
Sebastian
Wren, Ph.D.
All parents are concerned about
setting their child on the right road to academic success, and every parent
wants their child to perform well in school so their child can reap the
lifelong benefits of a good education. Most parents are very willing
to do whatever they can to help their child develop a good foundation for
school, and the best way parents can start their children off on the right
foot is to give them a good foundation in the world of literature and text.
In fact, research has shown that children who are successful in school
typically spent over a thousand hours engaged in literacy-developing activities
with their family before ever stepping foot in a classroom. Similarly,
research has shown that children who do not succeed in school typically
have not spent very much time in the first five years of their life engaged
in reading-related activities with their families.
Most parents believe that regularly
reading to their child is the most important thing they can do to develop
literacy skills. However, reading to children by itself is not sufficient
to develop a good pre-school foundation in literacy. And what's more,
the things parents do when they read to their children can make the activity
more or less powerful.
Before we get to what is termed
"lap reading" (holding your child in your lap and reading to him or her),
let's consider some other, powerful activities that parents can do with
their children to establish a solid literacy foundation.
Letter Knowledge
The fundamental building blocks
of text are letters, and children who enter school with substantial letter
knowledge are much more likely to develop good reading skills, and by extension,
are much more likely to succeed in school overall. To be successful
readers, children will need to be able to identify and distinguish the
individual letters of the alphabet at a glance without any conscious effort.
To become that familiar with the letters, children need to spend a lot
of time with them -- playing with them, examining them, and learning what
makes one letter different from another.
Research has shown that learning
to identify letters by name is not all that important. Some people,
for example, teach their children to identify letters by a sound that corresponds
to the letter, and that seems to work just as well. However, what
is important is that children be able to quickly and easily distinguish
the letters. To do this, children will need to spend some time comparing
similar letters side by side, and they need an adult to explicitly show
them what features of the letter to look for that make it distinct from
other similar letters (what separates the O from the Q? What makes
the G different from the C?).
Some letters can be hard for children
to learn to distinguish because children are very concrete thinkers.
If you turn a chair upside down, it is still a chair. But if you
turn an "n" upside down, it becomes a "u."
Here are some things parents can
do with their children to help them learn to distinguish and identify the
letters of the alphabet.
Using letter-tiles or cards with
letters on them, have your child sort the letters into piles based upon
a particular feature of the letter. For example, have your child
separate the letters into one pile for curved lines (O, S, C, etc.), one
pile for straight lines (T, M, X, etc.), and one pile for both straight
and curved lines (B, d, p, etc.). Once the letters are in those piles,
have your child separate the letters even further (letters that "stick
up" (d, b, h, etc) and letters that "hang down" (y, g, p, etc.).
You can also teach your child to separate capital letters from lower-case
letters using this same approach.
Also, children love to play the
memory card game, sometimes called "concentration." A version of
"concentration" can be created to help children learn about the letters
of the alphabet. Create or obtain a collection of letter cards --
two cards for each letter of the alphabet (for young children, you may
want to start with just a handful of letters and work up to all 26).
Shuffle the cards and spread them out on a table, face down. Have
your child pick up a pair of cards, and if they match they keep them.
If they don't match, they have to put them back where they were.
This is also a good way to teach children to match upper- and lower-case
letters.
Playing with letter-shaped refrigerator
magnets or letter blocks, and identifying letters in the newspaper or story
books are also good activities parents can do to help their children to
be more familiar with the letters of our alphabet.
And of course, encouraging children
to write can be an extremely powerful activity to help them learn the letters.
They may start out writing scribbles, only inserting the occasional "real"
letter, but as they practice, and as they get feedback, they will become
more adept at writing more and more letters.
Vocabulary
When it comes to learning new words,
children are like sponges. Young children have the ability to learn
a new word after hearing it just once (a skill that apparently goes away
as we get older). By the time a child enters school, that child has
learned between 2,500 and 5,000 words. For the first few years of
formal education, an average child will learn about 3,000 new words per
year. That's 8 words per day!
However, while these numbers describe
averages, they hide the fact that there are huge differences in vocabulary
development among individual children. Some children enter school
knowing as much as twice the number of words that their peers know.
This discrepancy in vocabulary size correlates very strongly with reading
achievement. In fact, research has shown that one of the primary
differences between successful readers and unsuccessful readers is vocabulary
size.
Vocabulary and reading are very
closely related -- to be a successful reader, the child must learn the
connection between printed words and familiar spoken words. Further,
once a child becomes a successful reader, text becomes the primary source
of vocabulary development. You may not realize this, but as a literate
adult, you learned most of the words you know by reading text (as opposed
to watching TV or listening to speech). Thus, as years of education
pass, the discrepancy between the vocabulary size of some students over
their peers can grow from two-fold to over four-fold. Imagine how
frustrating it must be for some high-school students to not understand
75 percent of the words that their peers know and use.
The gap in vocabulary size between
successful readers and struggling readers begins early and grows over time,
so it is important to address the gap as early as possible. Here
are some things parents can do with their children to help them develop
larger vocabularies.
For very young, pre-school children
who are not yet reading, the best way to develop vocabulary is through
natural, oral communication. Very young children learn new words
by hearing them and using them in conversation. Every time you are
out with your child, you have an opportunity to introduce your child to
new vocabulary. Even just running errands at the grocery store is
a rich opportunity to enhance your child's vocabulary.
Young children are concrete thinkers,
and initially, they are very adept at attaching names to concrete things.
It is good to encourage and support this by providing many names for concrete
objects. At the same time, as you attach names to concrete objects,
you can talk about them more abstractly. For example, concrete names
that can be attached to a banana would include "banana," "fruit," "yellow,"
"bunch," "peel," etc.. Abstract words that could be brought up in
relation to a banana would include "delicious," "slippery," "ingredient,"
etc..
Words can be known at different
levels of understanding, too. Most of the words that very young children
"know" are only known superficially -- the child may say the word but may
not know what it means or how to use it in a sentence. It is important
that children be familiar with a large variety of words, but it is also
important that their understanding be more than superficial. When
your child uses new words, talk about what those words mean, and do things
that help the child to practice using those words.
Ironically, though, the best way
for children to develop a rich vocabulary is to read, and read a lot.
Vocabulary growth and reading success are intimately related. A child
needs a rich vocabulary to develop good reading skills, and as reading
skills improve, the child's vocabulary increases. This in turn makes
it easier for the child to read, so the child reads more, which enhances
the child's vocabulary more. Reading and vocabulary development feed
off of each other and support each other. Oral vocabulary comes first,
and to begin this cycle, children must have an adequate vocabulary to develop
those early reading skills. However, once children begin reading,
parents can support their vocabulary growth by encouraging them to practice
reading, and practice a lot. It is estimated that poor readers spend
less than six minutes per day actually reading real, connected text while
good readers spend more than an hour per day reading. That's a ten-fold
difference! It's no wonder that these children have vocabularies
with so much greater breadth and depth than their peers.
Background Knowledge
Vocabulary development is very strongly
correlated with background knowledge. Background knowledge is really
just knowledge about the world, and for young children, the two primary
sources of information about the world are first-hand experiences and second-hand
stories (either from television and movies or from family members and friends).
Everybody has background knowledge
about some things, but some children have more background knowledge about
the things that are more likely to be relevant to what is studied in a
formal classroom. And children who have the background knowledge
that is relevant to topics that come up in classrooms have advantages when
it comes to reading and academic success.
Ideally, teachers would begin their
instruction with the background knowledge that children have, and they
would build upon that knowledge. However, parents can focus on enhancing
the background knowledge of their children as well, and there is much that
parents can do to enhance their child's background knowledge.
It is popular to dismiss television
as a vast wasteland, but there are some programs that can be a powerful
source of background knowledge for children. There are any number
of programs aimed at helping children to learn more about a variety of
topics ranging from wildlife and the environment to society and culture.
Television becomes a wasteland when parents don't monitor and control what
their children are watching, but not all television is bad. And children
can develop healthy television viewing habits if parents encourage them
at a young age to watch the informative and educational programs.
Nothing beats first-hand experience,
though, when it comes to enhancing background knowledge. Children
who have traveled to the ocean and spent some time exploring the beach
have a much richer background knowledge in that area than children who
have only heard about it or watched programs about it on television.
Even seemingly trivial experiences, such as a trip to a bread factory,
or a trip to the zoo, can be educational experiences that broaden the child's
horizons a little further.
Stories that parents and family
members tell are also very meaningful to children. They hear first-hand
from somebody who lived the experience, and that adds to the richness of
their background knowledge.
Every opportunity that parents have
to enrich their child's background knowledge through first-hand experiences
or through second-hand stories should be exploited, and no experiences
should be considered trivial. Children learn a great deal about the
world by listening to stories and engaging in conversation with adults
and friends. They may not realize it, but when parents spend time
telling stories and describing their life experiences with their children,
they are actually improving the odds that their child will become a successful
reader.
Phoneme Awareness
The English writing system is a
tool for representing the sounds in speech (phonemes) with symbols on a
page (letters). For children to be successful readers (at least in
English), they must develop an awareness of the sounds in spoken language,
and there is no reason to wait until they go to school to develop this
"phoneme awareness."
As mentioned earlier, young children
are very concrete thinkers. Whole words represent objects or ideas.
Breaking words apart and paying attention to the sub-parts of words is
not something that children do naturally. Consequently, most children
enter school without an awareness that spoken words are made up of sounds.
Ask a 5-year-old what a "long word" is, and the child may say something
like "snake" or "train" or "mile." To the child, these are "long
words" because they represent long things.
Helping children to develop an awareness
of speech sounds (phonemes) is becoming a top priority for teachers because
research has shown that a lack of phoneme awareness is a serious obstacle
to reading success. Children who come to school with phoneme awareness
are significantly more likely to develop reading skills earlier and easier
than children who lack phoneme awareness when they come to school.
Parents can help their children
to develop phoneme awareness before their child ever gets to school, and
thus enhance the odds that their child will learn to read. Here are
some things that parents can do to help their children develop phoneme
awareness.
Rhyming games are always fun, and
can be a good start to developing an awareness of the sounds in speech.
Take turns with your child thinking up rhyming words for a particular word
(e.g. "wall"). The last person who can think of a rhyming word "wins."
The game "I spy with my little eye"
can be modified to help children develop awareness for phonemes.
Start off by saying, "I spy with my little eye, something that begins with
a," and then add a speech sound (instead of a letter). So you might
say that you see something that begins with a /sh/, and the options could
be "shoe" or "sugar" or "shirt." To extend this game and make it
more challenging, say that you see something that ENDS with a certain sound
(so your child has to think about the last sound in the word instead of
the first).
You can also teach your child "Pig
Latin." Pig Latin requires removing the first sound from a word and
adding it to the end of the word (followed by "ay"). So "table" would
become "able-tay" and "mouse" would be "ouse-may."
There are also a variety of songs
and books available that help children develop an awareness of the sounds
in speech. Dr. Seuss books and
other similar books are wonderful for teaching children how to "play
with words." There is also the song "Apples and Bananas" that is
very popular with children and which encourages them to manipulate the
sounds in words.
Any activity that helps children
to pay attention to the sounds that make up words (phonemes) is going to
help children develop phoneme awareness, and is therefore going to give
them a head-start in developing literacy skills.
Lap Reading
At the outset of this article, it
was mentioned that many people believe that reading to their child is the
most important thing that they can do to help their child develop good
literacy skills. As we have seen, there are many other things that
can and should be done to establish a good foundation that will support
reading and academic achievement.
However, there is still a place
for lap reading. Sitting with a child and reading a book is a wonderful
activity. It strengthens the bond between parent and child, and it
teaches children a great deal about the value and usefulness of literature.
Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between how often
children are read to and how much they enjoy reading as they grow up, so
time spent reading to your child is not time wasted.
Lap reading can be made more powerful,
though, and parents should know what they can do as they read to their
child to make it as rich an experience as possible.
First of all, parents should know
that lap reading and bedtime reading are two different things. Lap
reading should be an active, collaborative exploration of the text that
you share with your child. To explore the text with you, the child
should be alert and engaged. Bedtime reading, of course, is quite
the opposite.
When you and your child engage in
lap reading, you should sit where both of you can see the text and pages
clearly, and you should very explicitly model what you are doing as you
read. Periodically use your finger to point to the text as you read
and very explicitly show your child how you sound-out and pronounce each
word. If you are reading a story, periodically stop and ask questions
and make predictions about what will happen next. Ask the child to
do the same. Tell the child what you are thinking as you read --
don't keep your thoughts to yourself, but instead, show your child what
readers think about as they read. Talk about the child's own experiences
and relate them to the story or the information in the book.
And keep in mind that lap-reading
does not always mean reading a story -- sitting with your child and reading
magazines, and newspapers, and informative text is an excellent lap-reading
activity. They simultaneously gain information about the world (enhancing
background knowledge), and they also begin to learn about the mechanics
of text and learn the value of reading, and develop healthy reading comprehension
skills that will substantially enhance their likelihood of success in school.
Research has shown that the earlier
that children develop reading skills, the better off they are in school.
In fact, children who are still struggling to read grade-appropriate material
by the second grade are at a very high risk for reading difficulties and
for subsequent academic failure. Research has also shown that many
parents believe that learning to read is something that children learn
in the classroom (and not at home), and some parents, ironically, believe
that they are disrupting their child's education by teaching literacy skills
in the home.
It is critically important that
parents learn that teaching literacy skills in the home can only enhance
their child's chances for academic success, and further, it is important
that parents learn about the most powerful and effective activities they
can do with their children to help them develop good literacy skills.
With effective instruction from both parents and teachers, virtually every
child can read and succeed.
