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?