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Sunday, May 4, 2008
The journey to literacy: Priceless
Expert tips for helping your child learn to read. What things have you tried?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My soon-to-be 5-year-old son has recently become a READER! It is amazing to watch him pick up a book he’s never seen before and sound out the words and read the sentences. He’s so proud and so are we.
It’s an incredible journey for children to become readers. Parents must guide their kids from being non-speaking infants to talking toddlers and finally to school-age readers and writers. It is sometimes a slow and difficult process and many parents may wonder: How can I most effectively help my children become literate?
To try to answer that question, I interviewed reading expert Kathleen Hayes about emergent readers — or children who are just starting to learn to read. Hayes is the editor of Highlight Hive Five magazine, which is aimed at children ages 2 to 6. She is a former children’s librarian, teacher and professor of early childhood education. Here were some of her insights into helping our children learn to read:
“People mistakenly think that learning to read is only about seeing things in print and decoding them. Literacy is about speaking and listening and reading and writing,” says Hayes.
Because literacy is about communication, it’s not just important to read to your baby but also to talk to your baby. “Research is telling us now that when children come into school, if they haven’t had a lot of exposure to oral language, they’re not developing their own expressive and receptive language abilities (speaking and listening.)” Your babies and toddlers need to hear you playing with the language. Talk to them all the time and reinforce what they are seeing. (Oh, I see the blue bus.)
Hayes says babies and toddlers need the pictures and patterned language in picture and board books. “An important early emergent skill is how to read the picture,” she says. So when my husband and I read the “Nate the Great” chapter books with all three of our kids (because that’s what our eldest is working on), it isn’t the best reading for our 1-year-old. Our baby needs to develop the skills of examining pictures and looking for clues about what she is hearing. (Now I feel bad.)
The patterned language is also very important to young children, says Hayes. “If they’ve had lots of exposure to playing with language and the sound of language, they are much better prepared.” She says nursery rhymes and rhyming in general help train the ear to listen for the sounds of our language.
Young children need to see verbal communication transformed into the written, says Hayes, who as a teacher would ask 4-year-olds to tell her their news for the day. Then she would write what they said on a big sheet of paper. Later they would re-read it.
She said parents should demonstrate that we use print all the time and for many reasons. She suggests using a calendar with big squares and letting the children dictate what happened that day. The children can watch their parents write what they report and then they can re-read together later what happened. They see their words become print.
Write to relatives, she suggested, Send an e-mail to grandma — any kind of print is good. Bump up the font size and let them see their words coming up on the screen as they speak it. For 3- and 4-year-olds clicking on the keyboard and the mouse are easier motor skills than holding a pencil properly.
If they are old enough to write (5 and 6), let them use inventive spelling — just spell it how it sounds. There’s plenty of time to correct that later - it’s just important to get them reading and writing what they hear.
But don’t push children to write too soon. Hayes says the fine motor skills must be developed in a child for him to be able to write. And there are lots of fun activities parents can use to strengthen children’s fingers and help them develop those skills. Hayes says building Legos, playing with clay and Play-Doh are examples. (I’ve also heard that squeezing the tweezers in that Operation Game is good too.)
Read everything and make it relevant to them. Parents should think about literacy in a very broad context — let the kids read ads in the newspaper, read the signs on the street, or on the bus or subway. Reading doesn’t have to happen right before bed and in your pajamas. Let kids read things that are interesting to them — like the prize on the back of a cereal box.
