BASIC RECIPE FOR TEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN TO READ.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never
loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
BASIC RECIPE FOR TEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN TO READ.
Assumptions and prerequisites:
Illustrations, alphabet, phonics and sundry items
Adult literature and corruption. . .
A surprisingly large number of years ago I wrote this essay on what we learnt from our attempt at teaching our sons to read. A few people asked me to publish it, and we feel strongly that the subject is important enough to justify more attention. Get it wrong and you can do harm. Use a little patience and good sense, and you can do more good than you might believe. The whole process proved simpler and cheaper than we had expected, but a few warnings and functional principles that I include might prove helpful.
Before we undertook the project of teaching our children to read we did a lot of discussion and heart searching in the light of dire warnings about everything that could go wrong. In the end we elected to damn the torpedoes because, as we saw it, potential harm as predicted seemed speculative at worst, and besides we could not imagine what harm would be worse than depriving the children of their second most important channel of communication.
Not to spoil your anticipation of the outcome, we had no regrets then, and have not developed any since. Trying to get any coherent evaluations out of our sons is not easy, because neither can remember learning to read, any more than he can remember learning to converse. Accordingly it is hard for them to imagine what the deprivation of pre-school reading might have meant.
So: for anything it might be worth, and hoping it does readers and prospective readers a lot of good, here is our basic recipe for teaching young children to read.
Assumptions and prerequisites:
· The child:
o is willing
o has no relevant disabilities
o can already speak fairly fluently
o is at least of more or less average intelligence
· The adults ·
o have a good rapport with the child
o can afford 10-20 minutes per daily session for several weeks
Note that these assumptions are not absolute; some of them require subjective, but sound, judgment.
Still, the less confident one can be about them, the poorer the prospects for good results.
If reading is taught as fun, and enjoyable reading material is available, a child can learn basic reading skills in several weeks of brief daily sessions. The method I describe here worked well for us and neither of our now adult children can remember learning to read, any more than they can remember learning to talk. One of them can remember how, at the age of about four, he learnt to read silently instead of reading aloud; in our lessons he had learnt to read aloud, and it had not occurred to us that there was a distinction; in fact we did not even know about his epiphany till he mentioned it more than a decade later. Apparently he had been reading while his mother was on the phone one day and she had called out to him to be quiet. So he duly was quiet and discovered that he could go on reading just as well in silence, or even better.
That was that. The other cannot even remember any such experience, so I cannot answer for him.
The method we used
The method is a derivative of that described by Glen Doman in his book “Teach Your Baby to Read.” The edition we used may be a bit dated by now, and politically it is highly incorrect in some educational circles (hooray!!!) but the method works like a charm. Doman himself stresses that the book describes basic principles, not rigid instruction.
The essential points are that:
· Most healthy children in a healthy emotional environment enjoy reading as much as they enjoy other media of communication; that is to say tremendously.
· To read effectively very young children need to have the necessary neural paths trained.
· One key difficulty is that normal print is too small for untrained brains.
· The solution simply is to:
o present the first words in very large print, say with characters several centimetres high
o keep the typeface simple and unambiguous (unambiguous in particular!)
o start with simple words of direct interest to the child
o move on to interesting text as soon as possible (avoid either teaching boring lists of unconnected words, or Dick-and-Jane, Janet-and-John inanities.)
Materials
· First prepare flash cards containing one word each, written plainly and vividly in simple, unambiguous letters.
· Avoid typefaces in which say, lower case L and upper case I are identical. This may be unexpectedly difficult. Publishers of children’s books no doubt select typefaces simple-mindedly for their simplicity, but they very often offend in this respect. At this stage the simplicity of a typeface is far less important than unambiguity. Simplicity is anything but simple.
· The problem need not be fatal and there are a few approaches for dealing with it. One option simply is to ignore it until children object. If they do object, you explain why the letters are illogical and agree how stupid some people are, and you might say that if they print books when they grow up, they can use more sensible letter shapes. Otherwise you can neatly ink a small curly foot onto the lower case ls. It does not much matter whether the letters have serifs or not as long as each letter is clearly distinct in appearance.
Many of the typefaces commonly available on computers nowadays are acceptable. Trebuchet MS seems particularly suitable, but was not available in our day. Others that are not too bad include: Bookman Old Style, Times New Roman, Verdana, and the pointlessly maligned Comic Sans. I mention these not because they are the best, but because they are freely available and completely adequate for Western circumstances. Obviously, users of other alphabets and scripts would have to adjust accordingly, but I see no reason why there should be serious problems in general.
· At first use lower case only. Upper case can wait till it seeps in naturally. As a rule one hardly needs to mention it.
· Colour and illustration are important in that both should be strictly avoided at first. This is one of the few firm rules. No matter what your views may be concerning visual interest and cheerfulness or beauty, it is crucial at first to avoid distraction or confusion. Colours should be simple and stark and there should be no distracting or confusing drawings or decorations; certainly not at first.
Black print on white is fine; so is any other easily readable, strident contrast. It might be profitable to bear visual disabilities in mind, such as non-standard colour perception, but black on white covers most cases. If you are in difficulties, consult professionals for guidance.
As a rule, keep all the print the same colour, especially in the first few weeks. Only mix colours when there is a special reason to highlight something, and not until the child quite clearly understands that the words are the things that matter, not colour, illustration, decoration or anything else. For instance, once you are well into the lessons and are building sentences, you might want to show every place that the word “and” appears. Probably this is best done by using a bolder or larger font, but one just might have a valid reason to use colour.
But for the most part colour, like illustration, has no place in this exercise. It is noise, a source of confusion and distraction at a time when confusion and distraction are the last things one wants. The more Spartan and uniform the presentation, the better. At first there is just one objective: clarity plus distinctness to assist reading acquisition.
Keep that objective in view; the aesthetics of variety and creativity can wait a few weeks. Art for the sake of art can be introduced into other activities, such as drawing. That slight delay in introducing prettiness to text, can save months and save misery.
One convenient way to prepare the flash cards is by printing them with a word processor, using a laser or bubble printer, but one can do just as well with paint or ink on card if one works neatly. Letters of say 8 cm or three inches high, written in thick, smooth, consistent, bold lines, do nicely.
Follow your own initiative with the use of computer screens or the like instead of cards, but don't get distracted from the primary objective, which is to help the child learn to read and to love reading, not to indulge your love of frills and gadgetry. That too, can wait a week or two.
Prepare a selection of words, each on its own flash card. Many shops sell such printed cards nowadays, but home-made cards work as well if not better, as long as they are clear and stark; some commercial fonts common on such purchased cards are not particularly suitable, and in preparing your own cards you can choose fonts to suit yourself. Also, in constructing one’s own cards, one can prepare a selection designed for building sentences that should suit the child’s interests and tastes. Commercial cards often fail in this respect too.
Procedure
Start with just two words on the first evening (Doman says one, but I found it easier with two, so that it was immediately clear that different cards could say different things.) One word could be say, “mama” and the other “baby” or “girl” or something equally basic and visually different, but in the same size, font, and colour. The only difference should be in the spelling, not in the shape, size, or other visual clues, and certainly not pictures. We are learning reading, not recognition. As soon as the reading is right, you may import crutches to your taste.
The first lesson is one of the most critical. Let it once set the wrong tone, and you might have to drop the exercise. The whole process should be in a mood of anticipation and excitement, with no distractions. The lesson should last just one or two minutes.
Show one card dramatically, holding it still and very visible. Which word you choose is up to you; just be sure that it is short, phonetic, something the child can relate to, can say fluently, and preferably is interested in. Say: “This says: ‘head’!” No explanations, no analysis into letters, just the bald statement. Say it several times over. You may hide and re-display the card as you repeat the word. Then put the card face down and display the next card in the same way. It should be clearly different from the first; after showing "head", "hand" might not be a good idea, while showing "mom" should be fine, saying “This says: ‘mom’!” You then can alternate the cards, each time with a “This says:...!” but do not swap them rapidly or confusingly. Each time give the child a good, leisurely look. Show the same card twice in succession a few times.
If everything goes well and the child is obviously keen, then towards the end of the first evening you can hesitate before saying the contents and see whether the child supplies the word. But DO NOT PUSH AT THIS STAGE. Even just a little pushing can spoil everything. If the child does not read the words on the first few nights, be patient.
Do not be long-suffering; be eager and encouraging. Be willing to go over the top; it is easier to teach restraint later than to instill enthusiasm by beginning with sighs and droning. Doman said that the mother who screams: “WOW!” when the child gets something right, gets better results than the intellectual mother who says “That is very good,” even if she and her child are more intelligent.
In a few evenings the child should be able to read a few words as the cards are flashed. Do not show separate cards for little words such as “to” and “and”. Concentrate on familiar names and concrete nouns at first. Once there is progress, follow them with a few similarly clear verbs.
Don't make the process of adding new words too long; when a few suitable words are comfortably mastered, begin to make short, simple sentences and let the child read them. Put the little words into the sentences and deal with them casually in passing. Most pupils will pick up those little words almost without noticing. If the child asks about them specifically, just say: "Yes, this says ‘to’ and that says ‘and’," and pass on.
It is crucially important that the lessons are a treat and that there is no pushing. The child should be so keen on the lessons that after a while the threat of withholding them would be a serious matter in case of naughtiness. If ever you push you have lost the game and should drop the lessons for months or until you can sneak in the teaching in some other guise.
About at this point it becomes convenient to reduce the size of the print to say 3 cm or an inch or so. At this size one can put interesting or amusing statements on a convenient size of page, say a favourite snatch of poem, or a sentence with a ridiculous unexpected twist, say:
Are you green?
No, I am not.
How long have you been not?
Word tricks like this go down well and also serve to keep the child alert. They help in preventing any tendency to recite expected words instead of reading. Another game that children seem to love, is to set up a form sentence like: “the big girl eats the red apple” and keep swapping keywords: “the big girl eats the red worm”, “the big apple eats the green worm” and so on. Let the child suggest sequences.
It does no harm if the child discovers your cache of words and wants to know what the unfamiliar words are. When you answer, be sure to make the child confirm that each word has been learnt before continuing with the next word, instead of just telling the word and forgetting it.
Pushing consists in telling words before being asked. Anticipating lessons is no problem as long as it is the child’s idea. But do not encourage it.
Doman strongly warns against teaching the child letters and phonics. His reasoning was sound, but the degree to which he emphasised this contradicted our experience. Certainly one should not deal with phonics out of context, such as by teaching the child to drone the alphabet in advance, but when a child say, has initial trouble recognising the difference between “head” and “hand”, then one trick is to mask the word with one's hands and say “Look, this is an ennnnn. There is an ennnnnnnnnn in hannnnnd!”
In our experience this worked marvellously. There were no objections along the lines of “Why is it an n? What is an n anyway?” For a couple of evenings there was a quizzical “No nn?” Head shake in reply. “Head!” This can also be made into a game with: “Look there is a ‘win’ in ‘window’! An ‘in’ in ‘win’...” and so on. That same child, about a year later, heard the word “haberdashery” for the first time, asked what it meant, and without ever having seen the word, was able to spell it out of his head when challenged.
What is more, as he came to the first “r”, he hesitated and said “r?”, looking at us for confirmation. Though he never had been taught spelling explicitly, he had recognised that there was an ambiguity. Having got that right, he continued and finished the word confidently.
Reading material
The next, and bigger, problem is to find reading material that will hold the attention of the children and keep them reading during the critical stage between when reading is a new thrill and when reading becomes an automatic skill.
This may demand some persistent and intelligent shopping. Surprisingly few books are suitable. It is important at first that the fonts should be clear, that the letters are closely spaced within words, but that the words are distinctly separated from each other. Many children’s books deliberately aim for simplicity by separating the letters widely in words, and they compound the felony by setting the words close together. That is about as bad a combination as one can get!
We used to use an excellent series of small, cheap booklets by Methuen. Their only shortcoming was that they had sans serif Is and ls. They ranged from really simple four-page large-print stories, to informative natural history suited to children of say five or so. Incidentally, in retrospect, I thank the Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter books I read as a child, for what I now recognise as genuine natural history lessons.
Applause. Genuinely. OK, they weren't Darwin, but. . .
Be that as it may, in the Methuen booklets, even the simplest stories had a point: At the beach the little girl’s bucket drifts away. . . despair! Mummy fetches it back; triumph! A more complex story at the next level tells of hermit crab looking for a new home; intriguing, accurate and exciting, but easy to read.
A parent with a flair for creative writing for tots can bridge this stage with original works. Alternatively, there are many fine works for children, but not in a suitable format. With modern word processors, such material can be keyed or scanned in and printed in a suitable format.
Another trick is to leave notes to be found about the house, with little jokes or interesting trivia: (“A hungry snake can swallow another snake a little bigger than itself.”) or news of a surprise: "There is a new book (or an apple or some other treat) in the bottom drawer."
Since writing the foregoing, I have encountered online a series of books that I dearly wish I could have known of before teaching our children to read. It is available in electronic form online, and apparently also in hard copy from Amazon, though it no doubt is hopelessly out of print, having been written in the middle of the 20th century. The main author apparently was one Gerald Spellman Craig, a professor at Columbus University. The works were variously co-authored by Etheleen Daniel, Agnes Burke, Sara Baldwin, Mary Floyd Babcock and others who seem to have been prominent in various aspects of the teaching profession in those days and that region. I have not as yet been able to find out more about them, but am deeply impressed by their work.
Their format uses a simple, natural, unambiguous serif typeface with kerning (Century schoolbook?), permitting the letters to be closely spaced so that words form clear entities. The lines, and words within the lines, are well spaced, the sentences short and simply structured, vocabulary clear and simple, but no baby talk or redundant repetition. The books are illustrated, but without captions that could confuse a young reader.
The subject matter is science, not as lectures, but as discussions and observations in everyday life; hot and cold, wet and dry, pushing wagons or braking them, biological and geological observations, all sorts of things that could be of personal interest or importance in the lives of young children. In short, material that could keep them interested and reading even when there are no adults around. If someone could bring the books up to date in modern editions, I think they might be improved slightly in places, but even as they stand they are beyond my capacity to praise.
The books can be downloaded freely from:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29+creator%3A%28Craig%2C+Gerald+S.%29
Particularly useful titles include:
New Pathways in Science (Primer and Books 1 to 6)
Note once more, that though the books are intended as introductions to scientific topics, I mention them here purely as aids for the transition from the first stumbling stages of reading word by word, to comfortable reading fluency. I do not suggest that nothing better exists; I simply point out that these show what can be done at low cost, and with minimal resources. For example, if you get or print the paper versions, no electronics are necessary; in our day that has its educational advantages.
Illustrations, alphabet, phonics and sundry items
In teaching young children to read, it is particularly important not to let pictures disrupt the acquisition of the reading skill. At first the flash cards should be barren of all but the words. Later on, pictures may appear in books, but at first they should neither lead the story nor illustrate any of the words. As I mentioned, the Pathways in Science books are illustrated, but the illustrations are not captioned, so that they do not tempt novice readers into confusion nor distract them from the text.
Apart from reducing the challenge and encouraging mental laziness, illustration too closely associated with the text, or containing descriptive captions, can be misleading, so a child might for example read “tree” where the word printed is “oak”. This may impede the pupil's progress, demanding a long time and much tact to repair the harm. In this respect comic strips are particularly pernicious. They do little harm in small doses once reading is fluent, but they are a bad influence during the learning phases.
Learning the alphabet can be done in any enjoyable way, towards the end of the first elementary reading lessons. It is much more important that they can recite the alphabet in sequence than that they learn the letters in odd sequences as they learn to read. One reason is that the alphabet is important for looking things up or sequencing lists, or to implement the concept of spelling.
The phonics of the letters the children will pick up almost automatically. For instance, in our experience, a child that has not previously encountered the word, but sees "Philips" on an appliance, might understandably read it as "puh huh lips", but will without fuss accept correction when you explain that there are many silly spelling rules and that we say "f" when we read "ph", for instance, we say "filips" when we read "Philips".
Perils and Anathemata
Horrible warnings against early reading are easy to come by. Children will grow up unable to spell; they will develop language difficulties and be bored at school; they also will miss the joys of childhood stories. Both our sons are multilingual, being fluent in at least three languages and competent in more, both have spelt excellently since the age of three or four and both did well at school. Both were reading for their own pleasure before they were four years old, in spite of a major family relocation which delayed their home teaching for about a year. Both read their own choice of stories before they were five, so that they actually read more children’s material than they would have done if they had had to depend on grown-ups for stories. Both read to classes or to friends when appropriate, and in fact, in more than one language. None of this reduced their pleasure in family readings of stories or entertaining non-fiction. Obviously the worst consequences of early reading are not inevitable.
For many decades in South Africa the official teaching strategy was based on “reading readiness” and similar Piagetian naïveté that excluded schooling before the year in which the child would turn six. Our family rejected such nonsense, but somewhat reluctantly decided against formal home schooling. Instead we compromised. My wife located a demanding government school in the university town where we lived, and supplemented the official product with various external classes and educational activities of reasonable entertainment value.
But we could not get off scot-free. Our younger son we sent to a preschool crèche-type institution for one year, and because it was government-subsidised, they had to follow strict rules, such as: no numbers or letters on the walls, only pictures, in case innocent children afterwards went to school already offensively numerate or literate, or otherwise confused.
That led to a whole lot of incidents of varying annoyance, harm, and amusement.
For example, more than a decade later, that son and his mother happened to meet a young lady who asked whether he remembered her.
Err... sorry, no...
She then told my wife that on one occasion their teacher at that crèche had told the class to be quiet while she went to a meeting. The class predictably became rowdy in short order, but our boy wandered to the reading corner where the teacher sometimes would sit and read to them. There he happened on an unattended story book and settled down to read. This little girl came by and asked what he was doing.
“Reading.”
“Oh! Read to me!”
So they settled down amicably and he read to her. Others came by and pretty soon the whole class was listening to the story. Quiet as mice.
Then the teacher came back. Instead of thanking God to find the class quiet, she helicoptered, screamed, snatched the book away, and forbade the child ever, ever to go into the reading nook...
Etc. . .
After all, what if the inspector had shown up unexpectedly? Surely he would have invoked the shade of Piaget, and stopped their subsidy. . .?
Well, as the boy already had been reading at home for about two years, for his own pleasure, it was pretty late to shut that stable door.
However, he had forgotten the whole fuss till his erstwhile crèche-friend recounted the event. But what nonplusses me utterly, is how on Earth the authorities could maintain that such self-education was a sin and a disaster, in the face of such evidence; it can’t be rare.
Anyway, for authoritative illustration of the principle, patently drawn from life, read the second chapter of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
Learning to read other languages was also easy — practically automatic. Our children were bilingual but learnt to read in English. Almost without instruction, they spontaneously picked up reading Afrikaans. When we found them reading Afrikaans newspapers, we did explain that g, v, w, and a few items like that sounded different in Afrikaans.
They accepted the information without comment, but I suspect that our intervention was unnecessary.
One thing one might have to guard against, is bookworming; reading is an addictive vice. "Go outside and get some fresh air and exercise! And if I catch you under the blankets with that torch again. . ."
It also may be necessary to enforce good reading posture to avoid eye problems (e.g. one of our children got a ‘lazy eye’ from, we suspect, lying and reading with one eye in the pillow.)
Adult literature and corruption. . .
If there are adult books lying about the house, and a child elects to read them, no problem. No real censorship is necessary. The parts that one might censor usually will pass the child by. At the age of six, one of ours found, read, and re-read a paperback copy of “The Broken Sword”, a Nordic fantasy by Poul Anderson, full of violence, non-explicit sex, incest and so on.
The book did not dwell on such things; it just happened to be based on material from a tragedy in Norse mythology, and it was consistently in character. It happened also to be a rattling good story, well written. (Well Anderson generally was very good, of course.) Incomprehensible items in the book, such as sex, the child apparently skimmed over as uninteresting.
One difficulty in later years was that by mid-primary school, they had exhausted the resources of the local public library's children's shelves. In the face of considerable resistance, we had to persuade the librarians to permit them into the adult section to select books for themselves. Again, there was no problem with their selection of books. The bad stuff generally is boring, and the children do not grow fangs and exude green saliva as soon as they encounter unsuitable material.
Anyway, browsing through a public library can be quite broadening to young minds. Having such clients can be instructive to librarians too. . .
What our modern book-burners would think of all this, I retch to imagine; I cannot bring myself to contemplate their dilemma with compassion, but I could weep for their children. . .
Teaching classes
We had no personal experience teaching classes of children; in fact we taught our two separately (the age difference was just over 1 year).
All I can say is that separate teaching worked for us. I understand that children tend to teach other or learn very well from the teaching of other children. No doubt there also is a lot of on-line experience dealing with the likes of that. I suspect that the major constraint is whether one can work the topic into the ethos or activities of the group.
In a group in which reading is valued, encouraged or admired, I should expect any "well-adjusted" child to progress not just rapidly, but almost unconsciously; in various ways the process of learning to read is suspiciously similar to learning to speak, and in particular is similar to learning sign language for the deaf.
(For clarification of that point, I recommend the book "Seeing Voices" by Oliver Sacks, and this link: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-51372265/how-nicaragua-s-deaf-chldren-invented-a-new-sign-language There will be many more, but those two should do for conveying the common themes.)
In conclusion
Our own experience has been of such low investment, and such lasting and nearly unalloyed benefit, that we cannot but recommend the approach to others.
Posted by Jon Richfield at 12/22/2013 03:06:00 PM
Ghastly example
Since writing the above, I encountered the following horror story online in
The New Yorker Daily For Thursday, September 1, 2022
Two and a half years ago, Jessica Winter’s kindergartner was learning to read, when Winter noticed something strange: her daughter wasn’t familiar with phonics. She soon discovered that her child’s school, in Brooklyn, was using a curriculum called Units of Study, developed by the education professor Lucy Calkins. The teaching is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy, in which young readers are encouraged to read books silently on their own, figuring out unknown words by looking at contextual clues: using “picture power” (guessing words based on illustrations) and memorizing common “sight words” (like “and,” “the,” and “who”).
“What Calkins was proposing, it seems to me, was literacy by vibes,” Winter writes, in which children achieve reading fluency through “proximity or osmosis” rather than through phonics. In a fascinating reported piece, Winter traces the history of what have become the reading wars in America, and the lively, often confounding, opinions of adults that have shaped the lessons of children. (President Theodore Roosevelt once proposed simplifying the spelling of “fixed” to “fixt” and “kissed” to “kist.”) And she delves into the continuing battle over balanced literacy, which has dominated New York City’s public schools—and many others across America—for decades.
—Jessie Li, newsletter editor
Notice the penalties for transgressing some rules arising from our experience. Clearly Jessica Winter is an observant parent, and one would expect her daughter to be receptive of a bit of corrective assistance, but the bad experience was quite unnecessary, and might put less fortunate children off reading. Osmosis is not phonics and no substitute for phonics in the wrong contexts.
That strikes me as a textbook example of how an accepted authority with a bee in the bonnet plus an impediment in principles of analysis and design, can hamstring whole generations of a population's education.
I am reminded of another quite intelligent child who pointed out the word "pens" on a packet of felt-tips and volunteered that it said "chalks".
So much for "osmosis"! Learning by content, contact, and context is valuable, but to learn outright errors for lack of guidance is to be avoided wherever avoidance is practical; what unfortunately is unavoidable, though generally not disastrous, is that the independent reader learns to pronounce some obscurely spelt words incorrectly. To compound that with misreading words altogether, is definitely harmful, and to compound injury with insult, it is grossly unnecessary, as I hope I have made clear by now.
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