What I Wish People Understood About Learning to Read

If you think about all the pieces that have to fit together to help a child learn to read it's overwhelming. Here's a list of a few concepts kids need to begin to read:

- Know where to begin reading on a page of text
- Know that we read left to right
- Learn the difference between a letter and a word
- Understand that there is space between words on a printed page
- Know the sounds that letters make
- Know that certain letters, when put together, make a distinct sound ("ck" doesn't say "/k/ /k/", it just says, /k/)
- Have some words memorized because they can't be "sounded out" (the, was)

Then, if they want to be able to make sense of what they read, they have to have an even bigger bank of words to read automatically so more cognitive resources can be spent understanding the story, rather than deciphering unknown words.

So, learning to read is tough!

Following are some comments I hear adults make when talking about young readers. And responses I'd like to say.

Trying-to-Be-Helpful-Adult: "I think she's just memorizing the book. She's not really reading the words."
Me: "Awesome! That means she has heard some fluent reader read this book to her enough times to make the story familiar. This probably also means that this child has access to many other books being read to her. The more exposure this child gets to books, the better her understanding of story structure and the better her vocabulary will be. She's also probably seeing someone point to the words as they read the story so she's being exposed to those important sight words we want her to memorize!"

Trying-to-Be-Helpful-Adult: "He just wants to read this same book over and over."
Me: "Awesome! How great that this boy has found a favorite book to love. Let him read that book a million times. Read that book to him each day if he wants. Maybe after you read it one day you can then say you'll pick a new book to try and attempt to broaden his horizons that way. Whatever you do, don't ever say, 'Nope, I'm sick of that book. We're not reading that book anymore." What a way to crush motivation that would be!"

Trying-to-Be-Helpful-Adult: "I don't think she's sounding out these words. I think she's just memorized them."
Me: "Awesome! That's exactly what we want to happen! Do you sound out each word when you're reading a book or do you know most of the words automatically 'by memory'? That's what I thought. You have them memorized. If you're really concerned, you can write those words on different paper, type them in different fonts and hang them around the house or classroom. You can also ask the child to find those words in books as she reads."

Trying-to-Be-Helpful-Adult (working with a kid reading a book who gets stumped on a word): "Sound it out."
Me: "No, he cannot sound out the word 'barn' or 'the', or 'what'. It doesn't work. Sounding out only works on words with regular patterns such as 'can', 'shut', or 'family'. Kids need to learn more strategies besides 'sound it out'. How about saying, 'look at the picture, now look at the beginning sound of that word, do you have a guess now?' or you can say something like, 'you know the word look, take off the L and this word has an H...how would that sound /h/...?' If you only tell a child to sound it out, they will continue to be confused and frustrated by what they read when that strategy fails them."

I know staff and parents and volunteers are really trying to be helpful and everyone really wants kids to learn how to read, but sometimes I get frustrated when I hear these things. It seems like these comments usually come with a negative connotation that is also observed by the new reader. I wish a conversation would go like this:

Trying-to-Be-Helpful-Adult: It really seems like Jimmy has memorized this story/those words. Is that age-appropriate? Is there something else I can be doing with him to make sure he continues to develop the necessary skills to be a successful reader?
Me: Kids to tend to memorize familiar books and that's OK. You can read that book with him and point to each word as he reads so he learns to match a spoken word to a printed word. (and then continue the conversation further)

Have any of you had these same frustrations? How have you handled these comments?

Monday Mystery Book

I survived the first two weeks of school! It has been pretty darn fun but also pretty darn tiring! I'm working with kindergarten and first grade students who have emotional and mental heath issues. Before school started I got all kinds of warnings from people like, "the kids don't like reading" and, "So-and-So will just tear up the room when he gets upset so you don't want to have that on your desk" and, "the class really hated reading so the old teacher had to do math first and squeeze reading in later". Needless to say I was worried and had no idea how to plan for various levels and such severe behavior problems. I was still up for the challenge! I told John my goal for the year was to have the students leave my room and head back to their home schools with a positive attitude toward reading. I was going to MAKE readers! I also wanted to set the right tone in the room. I wanted to trust that if the students saw nice things and we did fun activities, they wouldn't want to tear the room up when they got angry.

On the first day of school I introduced our Monday Mystery Book. At circle time I showed the students the wrapped book on display. A student with good behavior would get to open the book at the end of the day and we would do a fun activity with the book. When the time came, the students were all eager to be picked. The first book I picked was an Elephant and Piggie title by Mo Willems- A Big Guy Took My Ball. The social worker in my room used to be a camp counselor so she was more than capable of acting out the book with me. The kids enjoyed the story but the best part happened the next day. One student arrived and came right over to me during breakfast to ask if we were going to have a mystery book that day!

This week's book on display

My second Monday Mystery Book was Hugo and the Really, Really, Really Long String. I LOVED the activity I did with this and I'm so sad I didn't take any pictures. My goal for the rest of the year will be to do a better job getting pictures to be able to post here.

While I was reading this story about a hippo following a string around his town I had the classroom assistant take yarn from our classroom, down the hall, into an office. He did a great job looping the string above backpacks in the hallway, around a copy machine and under the office door. At the end of the string was a "treasure"- new Play-Doh.

When I finished reading the book I acted surprised when I looked toward our schedule on the board and saw some string. I asked if they remembered the string being there when we went over the calendar. The kids were SO EXCITED to follow the string down the hall and find the treasure. When we came back to the room they got some free time with the Play-Doh.

In a future post, I'll write about play and free time in my classroom. The kids I'm teaching have poor social skills, anger issues, etc. but when they have been given or earn free time at the end of the day, there are few issues. I've observed one student show another how to hold a plastic bowling ball, and I've heard conversation and sharing while playing with Play-Doh.  I intend to keep this free time in our schedule so we can work on social skills, teach them new board games, and work on conversation skills.

In the meantime, I've got to get back to planning my lessons!