Is my child reading? Well enough?

Each child must LEARN to associate the written word with the spoken sound it makes. This is ultimately the code that needs to be cracked. Reading is NOT a natural ability, IT IS AN ACQUIRED SKILL.

For some it must be acquired painfully slowly or even not at all. This is sad because it is unnecessary. Every child can read. And if any child that enters a schooling system fails to do so, it is the failure of the teachers and the system, not the child. This requires a deep understanding of the process of reading, its developmental landmarks and its natural history. It also requires immense courage on the part of the teacher or the primary caretaker to admit that a system may not be working for a given child and switch to something that does work.

The 'Whole language' method of teaching language skills was how even I learned my language skills. I was lucky to be naturally endowed with the ability to decode. Some children may not be so lucky. The whole language method expects the children to 'work out' the words they do not know in the text from the clues in the text. This method relies on clues EXTERNAL to the word that needs to be decoded. Sometimes struggling readers, and even experienced readers unfamiliar with the text may not be able to 'work out' these words. This method of teaching or learning language does not equip the reader to tackle unknown words. It makes reading easier and faster IF the vocabulary is already strong enough...

My daughter was not so lucky... The systems at the time of her early schooling were neither decided completely FOR nor completely AGAINST this method of learning. .Her teachers did not make any special effort to make sure that children read. My daughter has a very strong auditory memory. And once her mind was exposed to spoken lesson, she could repeat it VERBATIM. Her teachers never realised that she was not reading at grade level. I kept pleading with them. I even suggested accomodation and special instruction so that she could catch up. She is brilliant! Her teachers would not have any of it! One even threatened to SHOOT me! That is if I ever mentioned the "D" word in relation to my own daughter. It is left to me to DIAGNOSE, 'MEDICATE', STRATEGISE, REMEDIATE and EDUCATE my extraordinarily gifted child whose brain is wired differently.

I set upon my own quest and came upon the Phonics method of teaching Language. Now this was FABULOUS even for a gifted adult reader like me. It gave me an anchor to peg my daughter and monitor her progress. It has been an uphill task, surely. The schools do not accommodate for borderline cases that can not be clearly labeled. They CANNOT! The doctors cannot make an unequivocal diagnosis. As a mother and a highly literate adult, I am left with no option but to find my own way in this stormy sea and teach my daughter to swim not only with the current but also sometimes hold her own against it.

SHE ABSOLUTELY REFUSED TO BE LABELED. SHE ABSOLUTELY REFUSED TO GO TO THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST. She is not like Darsheel, she retorts. Aamir Khan may have, infact, done a disservice by depicting a dyslexic in as bad a light as he did in TZP.

Dyslexia may not be as dramatic as depicted in that movie. It may be a hidden inability to develop reading skills as naturally as other age matched children. It may not be associated with attention deficit or with distractability or even with destructive behaviour.

In preschool, my daughter could not only memorise what was going on in her own class, but also what was being sung in the neighbouring class. It only needed to be loud enough to reach her ears. She learned nearly double the number of rhymes that her official class did. She was phenomenal. Even today, her learning is based majorly on being read to. Her ideas are remarkable, astounding, and ground-breakingly creative. She can say things better than she can write them. She has not yet started using the computer to her advantage. I am hoping she soon will. She loves Mathematics. Not because she has an extraodinary mathematical ability, though that may be part of why it is enjoyable for her- she loves Mathematics because "I do not have to write much in it!" She may be a borderline dysgraphic or someone who is lagging in a certain decoding skill, so she makes up in several other areas. This is not unusual. This often is more likely than the Darsheel story. Often these children are mistaken to be lazy/ simply uninterested. Far from it.

Teachers need to note that at some stage when the child is transiting from" learning to read" to "reading to learn", the gaps in reading skills can critically affect the performance and the self- esteem of the child.

Fortunately, now there are scientifically designed tests available that take less than five minutes and can be delivered with ease to your child even on a weekly basis. Unfortunately these tests have not become a part of Indian curriculum. It is extremely important for early educators, whether at home or at school to be watchful for the landmarks that reassure them that the child is on track or warn them that the child needs attention and to provide a nurturing and encouraging environment for the child to progress at an acceptable pace. This may factor in his or her natural learning (dis)ability or may provide that oft needed nudge to a struggler transforming him into an expert swimmer who will gracefully and easily cross the seas without drowning.

The Texas Education Agency has one such assessment availaible for early reading assessment- TPRI ( Texas Primary Reading Inventory) at www.tpri.org This assessment takes less than five minutes and is easy to conduct. There are a few others which are all from the US and validated for the various states there in. These are the PALS from University of Virginia and DIBELS from Oregon.

The Reading Panel constituted in the US strongly recommends identifying those who are falling behind and remediating EARLY. This benefits ALL children irrespective of the nature if their learning disability. And additionally this provides the children with strategies to break what has now come to be called the reading code.

Unequivocally I would strongly recommend any parent or teacher to start the Phonics way and do it in a structured and explicit manner. The structure needs to be logical and incremental. It needs to expose the children to progressively more difficult words and equip the child to read even the words he does not know by using the understanding of sounds they develop from their Phonics instruction.

A suitable sequence would be

1. English alphabet 'names'
2. Reinforcing the consonant sounds
3. Introducing the concept of vowels and the short vowel sounds- bat, beg, big, bog, bug
   
4. Introducing the long vowel sounds and the concept of the silent 'e'. Mat-e, bit-e, cop-e, cut-e.
5. Introducing common digraphs- a letter combination composed of two letters that say a single sound- sh(shoe, ship wish); ph(phone, photo), ch ( church, chirp, chill), th( thing, three, Beth), -ck( clock, black)
   
6. Progress to trigraphs or even quadrigraphs (-dge as in ledge, -tch as in itch), (-eigh as in neigh, -ough as in roug, -augh as in laugh). From here clusters of words can be taught to the children involving bigger and bigger letter clusters- SHOULD, WOULD, OUGHT, NAUGHT etc.
7. Specific emphasis on alliteration and rhyme. Introduce the concept of beginning sound and the terminal sound. Here it is helpful to use flash cards with printed letters and play with the child. Ask hin to make a word with the letter cards b, i, g beginning with the B sound. Now ask the child to replace teh BEGINNING sound with a P sound and ask what they get. Similarly with the terminal sounds, play replacement to get bit etc.
8. Introduce the concept of syllables, create the awareness for sounds that go on to make the syllable- PHONEME. Start SPELLING GAMES.
9. Introduce letter blends ( commonly occuring clusters where each consonat is pronounced- CLock, rOUnd,
   
10. Practice writing.

If you notice, I have arrived at writing at the tenth step in the sequence. It is important to recognise that the cognitive skills required to read develop earlier than the motor skills needed to hold a stylus. Also, as a general rule in early reading and literacy programmes, it is preferrable to make a child spell only the words that he can read.

As an easy assessment, whenever a new rule is introduced in the Phonics based teaching, a child can be made to read nonsense letter combinations that do not really make words. This tests their ability to sound out the letter combinations even if these do not make sense to them.

Specific exercises will come next.

Automaticity and fluency.

Automaticity is the ability to recognise words automatically... that is- without making effort or taking time. Automaticity is a good predictor of comprehension and fluency. Automatic recognition of words marks the Stage 1, 2 in Chall's Reading staging. In stage one, the early reader begins to decode letter sounds and put them together to form words. This progresses to word recognition and decoding of Stage two. By Stage two, the early reader not only begins to decode the words but also begins to attach meanings to the text.

Fluency, however, is not only automatic word recognition but also addition of expression and prosodic features to the text being read ( rhythm, intonation and phrasing). Apart from these components that add to the comprehension of the written text, fluency also involves Anticipation. Fluency, thus, can easily be seen as a function of speed of recognition of words ( automaticity) and of the meanings there in ( prosody).

Both are vital to reading comprehension.

Reading is uniquely a human attribute and one that has no genetic basis! So... we do not have genes that decide whether we will read or not, or how we read. There is some evidence, however, that the brain wiring may play a significant role in the reading abilities or the lack of them. It is encouraging to note that reading, like several other behaviours CAN be learned. It may take a sporty child one evening to learn how to cycle and another not so sporty child a week to do so. Once the skill of cycling, or swimming, or driving is learned, however, it is yours for life... a spinal reflex. So is reading.

Exposing the children to written word early, repeating often and making it fun all go a long way in nurturing automaticity. A child who KNOWS more words verbally, is able to readily recognise them when exposed to them even if they do not follow the rules of phonics.

English is not an easy language to master. A set of twenty six alphabets presents us with forty phonemes. The same sounds may be represented by several letter combinations, or even letters. Consider Car, Kite. Both the c, and the k say the K sound. Circle and set both say the S sound. If this was not bad enough, ch can say Church and Chemistry, ea can say EAr, hEArt, hEAd, rEAd ( as in reed AND as in red!)

The clues provided by contexts in these situations are readily used by fluent readers to attach not only the right sounds but also the right meanings to those sounds.

Thus, fluency also involves abstraction and synthesis of teh written words into meaningful texts. The quiggles become words BECAUSE we are able to CONSISTENTLY attach teh same meanings to them. It is this attaching meanings that MUST be taught early and reinforced periodically.

Also important is the fact that struggling readers are working with a psychological handicap. Who, in his right mind, would WANT to do something that they are not good at?! It is, therefore, important to move in logical steps, presenting easy to decode age appropriate texts, allow the child to succeed(!) and progressively raise the difficulty level of material presented.

It is also important to emphasise on HOW a child learns not WHAT a child learns. This is a concept difficult to grasp for present day parents as they focus on Class appropriate scholastic skills. If a child is able to read and answer questions from their text books, they are smart! This could not be farther from the truth. Today, the schooling is, infact, killing creativity of our children. It forces them to conform. It does not allow them to make mistakes. And if they do not make mistakes they do not uncover anything new for themselves.

In the initial stages, the child is 'learning to read' and then goes on to 'read to learn' in the middle school. Orthographic knowlege and its application necessarily has to become automatic by this reading stage. While most readers move effortlessly from stage to stage, some students need special strategies to be taught in order to acquire word automaticity. This is most easily taught by

• Introducing and expanding sight word recognition. These lists may be fifty to hundred word long for kindergarten and expand to 150- 250 words in a single academic year in class I. Language acquisition is rapid at this time. Repeat often.
• Use syllable patterns to teach word vocalisation. There rae essentially six patterns of syllables. These can be introduced at progressive stages as the child begins to understands and recognise each pattern. These patterns are:

1. Closed- where the vowels are 'closed' by consonants on either side- BaT. The vowel makes a short sound in these orthographic patterned words.
2. Open- where the vowel is bounded by a consonant only on one side- Go. The vowel speaks its own sound here, except with the 'e' endings where the preceding vowel speaks its own sound... Mat v/s MaTe.
3. Silent e- where teh e is not spoken but makes the preceding vowel say its own sound ( mentioned above)
4. vowel combinations- these are a little difficult to teach and must be introduced with care and in clusters of words. EA- read, bead, head, plead/ AI- ail, bail, fail, grail, hail, pail/ EI/ IE/ OU/ etc.
5. Controlled r- as in girl, bird, weird Here the ' i' is saying the 'u' sound.
6. Consonent l + vowel e- as in table, able, fable, circle etc

English orthography can be seen to result in four major types of words:

• Words that are read and spelt regularly. These words follow the phonics rules and are easy to read and write. Red, Bed, Mat, Ink, Drink etc
• Words that are read regularly but can be spelt wrongly following phonics principles. 'Goat' may be spelt Gote; Head may be spelt as HED.
  
• Rule based. These can easily be taught through well defined and consistent rules." i always after e except before c, or when said as A, as in neighbour and weigh". Or doubling for making continuous consonant ending words - run- ruNNing.
• Irregular these are the words that do not seem to follow any rules nor phonics- cue/ queue, beautiful.
  

Each of these orthographic patterns must be presented to readers and reinforced and repeated for orthography to become an automatic response to the written word.

For fluency to become as reflexive as automaticity, functions of syntax, chunking, punctuation marks, intonations and emphases need to introduced early.

On a light note, we may end this heavy section by an anonymously writtena nd often quoted poem that once found its way into my mail box, too!

I take it you already know,
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps. Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead - it’s said like bed, not bead,
For goodness’ sake, don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword. And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Why man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five.

• 
  

How to become a good reader?

Once the initial hurdles are crossed...
Once the child has learnt to take the first tottering steps...
Once the child can be called a READER...

The next milestone is in grooming the reader into a GOOD reader.

While the degrees of good and the acceptance of standards may vary, a good reader, essentially :

1. Reads fluently and in flow.
2. Understands what he reads.
3. Is able to get meanings in context even when exposed to hitherto unknown words.
4. Follows some basic techniques, knowingly or unknowingly, to make sense of the text presented.
5. Is able to connect the text he reads to the real life requirements he faces.

All of the above require the basic steps in a hierarchical step ladder:

1. Sound/ letter recognition
2. Word decoding and recognition
   
3. Vocabulary adequate to build flow and fluency
4. Comprehension and motivation to move beyond the above mentioned into joyful, entertaining reading with expression- tons of reading...

When asked to operate the ipod, I am not at step 1; I donot recognise beyond the on/off and forward/ back controls. But my daughter can listen, play, shuffle, browse the web, read/ send her e-mails, download/ upload pictures/ songs/ text with ease that I find mind-boggling!

I could teach her a thing or two about reading, and strategic reading; she can, however, teach me loads on loads of other things in which I am a true illiterate!

I do have the strategies in place to achieve 1,2 and 3 by having the most important ingredient that children have abundance of but that which adults rarely do. tenacity. Stick-to-itiveness. Motivation.

We need to encourage all children that we connect to that the single most important trait that can help them in life is just 'showing up, everyday, despite all the odds.'

Introduce an element of excitement into the classroom or home. Play games that incidently teach the lesson you need to teach.

Spelling? Take it up from basics, build it up- mat-mate-material. Even complex words can be broken down into phonetic components that are easy to spot.

Grammar? TAke it up from basics! Words are formed from letters and words go on to form phrases, clauses and sentences. Sentences can be simple or compound/ complex. Sentences also grow. The very basic NOUN-VERB-OBJECT can transform into Adjective- NOUN-VERB- adverb-Adjective OBJECT or further into ones with several interrelated nouns/ pronouns and prepositions and so on.

The building that starts from the foundation is stronger and more resilient. Build everything from the basics. While it is easy to provide answers, it is infinitely more ewarding to provide strategies to look for the answers. A teacher who simply focuses on the curriculum to finished in an academic year is doing a great disservice to the task he has taken on- teaching.

Allow the children to make mistakes and proceed from these mistakes. In fact make a mistake diary! Use the initial mistakes as memory pegs for the corrections.

Be spirit whisperers.

Be mentors.

Be patient.

Educate.

Prepare the young ones for their future. It is going to be very different from the future our childhood predicted.

Address the following issues when teaching languages/ linguistic skills:

1. Vocabulary- use good language and encourage the children to madel the same behaviour.
2. Flow/ Fluency- encourage reading out loud- with appropriate stops. Allow for smooth word recognition.
3. Expression- reading can make sense only if read appropriately. A flat monotone without any stops or with very frequaent stops and word breaks impair comprehension.
4. Comprehension strategies like predicting/ inferring/ analysins must be explicitly taught and make conscious practices rather than unconscious or subconscious behaviours.

EAch of the above can be taught actively and explicitly. This shall be the course of further chapters.

The first few sight words

Sight words are those words that do not follow discernible phonics principles. For example NO, KNOW; TO, TOO, TWO.

Many of the sight words cannot be taught through pictures. Examples are of words like IF, BUT, AND, TO.

These words occur frequently enough in most routine texts for the students' fluency and flow to be affected if they are not readily recognised.

Though children may find it hard to learn ALL the sight words, it is worth the effort to teach these words along the way. The strengthening phonics make the child motivated and emotionally confident to read at or beyond grade level. Adding sight word ( or Dolch words, or Fry words) vocabulary to this expanding foundation makes a sound preparation for a strong and resilient reader.

Psychologist and reading researcher Diane McGuinness has found that there are about 100 very commonly used words. This requires word level memorisation rather than figuring out the sound while reading. She has dramatically reduced the Dolch list to a more manageable length.

The other important aspect of sight words is that these words are used frequently enough to affect fluency. In order to improve reading skills and the comprehension, the children have to be introduced to the concept of sight words. These words then contribute to the automaticity rather than interrupting the flow of reading.

As we discussed earlier, the first word recognition or decoding must introduce the short vowel sound. Alongside, the teacher (or parent) must introduce the first sight words by the time the child is in kindergarten.

There are some readily available lists like the Dolch/ Fry lists that can be used as a starting point. The original Dolch list contained 220 words. Diane McGuinness made it easier and less daunting by shortening the list to about a hundred words, as we have mentioned earlier. Or a list can be generated by the teachers while reading an age-appropriate book.

A kindergarten list could be something as follows:

1. A
2. An
3. The
4. Who
5. He
   
6. She
7. Number names one/ two/ three/ four/ five/ six/ seven/ eight/ nine/ ten
   
8. And
9. Colours red/ blue/ yellow/ green
10. From
11. Are
    

A teacher can generate lists according to the reading material they use. Some of the early readers from Lady Bird Series are excellent to introduce both the early phonics as well the early sight words. A few titles that I found especially useful are

1. Three little pigs
2. Chicken Licken
3. The gingerbread man
4. The magic porridge pot

For teachers who can and for children who want to, this is also an excellent opportunity to create your own books. These could introduce concepts like good manners, colours, animals, emotions- happy, sad, angry, hurt etc. The teachers can follow the principles laid out in the previous chapter to generate a template for the children. For the beginning readers of pre-school to kindergarten level this would mean:

1. Ten to fifteen pages per book.
2. Two to five words per page.
3. One word change per page.
4. Relevance. Introducing the concept of balls/ dolls/ cars is something the children can easily begin to visualise. Introducing the concept of Ball-room, however, may not be easy for them.
   
5. One example :

-Page1-
The cat.
-Page2-
The hat.
-Page 3-
The cat with the hat.
-Page4-
Funny hat.
-Page 5-
Funny cat.
-Page 6-
The rat.
-Page7-
The mat.
-Page 8-
The rat on the mat.
-Page 9-
The cat and the rat.
-Page 10-
The cat chases the rat.

The children can be taught to make simple line drawings for the cat and the rat, for the hat and the mat and then allowed to colour their own book. It is always thrilling for the children to create their own books. They become keepsakes for parents, too.

Another idea is for the rainbow... you could explore the same...

Pages 1 to 7
Blob of colour and the colour name.
Page 8
All seven colours in a rainbow. Word Rainbow
Page 9
Clouds
Page10
rain

Sight words may be taught in the following ways:

1. Flash cards
2. Computer games
3. Group activities and board play

Most methods of teaching sight words involve repetition. This is important- a child who sees a word and hears it often enough will learn to read it. For natural readers this may be effortless, whereas for struggling readers, this may take hours upon hours of patience and slogging.

Rhyming is another great technique to teach any new concept. Children can be encouraged to create their own (nursery) rhymes around the focus for a given day... he/she, and/ hand/ band/ sand.

The excitement of creating their own poems makes it fun to remember the poems, too.

These activities exploit the principle of phonetic as well repetitive reinforcement to teach early readers. Teaching sight words purely as whole words can introduce an element of confusion and promote dyslexic ( dysfunctional- lexicography) reading problems. There are a significant number of words in the original Dolch list of 220 that can be pegged phonetically and can as easily be confused dyslexically. Look at the following examples:

1. is/ in, no/ on
2. is/ as, an/ am, and
3. at/it/if/ of/to
4. he/ her/ here

Interestingly, most of these above mentioned words are also possible to decode phonetically.

It is important to understand, as Kylene Beers writes in When Kids Can't Read, that the goal of reading is to make sense of the written word! It is quite simple and infinitely complicated. Were we to condense human history into a single day, we probably started reading in less than last ten minutes!

Humans do not have any specific reading genes nor do they have any specific reading anatomical regions of the brain. Many areas of the brain light up in recognising, putting together, and then making sense of the written word. And things can go wrong at a lot of functional levels without there being any structural abnormality to define it!

In conclusion, therefore, it can not be overemphasised that teaching sight words has to follow the following principles:

1. Associative learning. Pick out the sight words from a book the child is comfortable with. Early readers are great for this.
   
2. Phonetic reading where possible
3. Memory pegs to learn clusters of words together.
4. Repetition.
5. Rhyming
   
6. Creative learning games- create your own books/ create your own poems
7. Encourage leveled reading. Take the child through baby steps and build them into a tottering walk into a comfortable stroll and onto a happy run with the wind blowing into their faces making it fun and motivating to go on.
8. Encourage voluminous reading. Reading does NOT come naturally. It has to be worked on. Just as we work on our relationships with people, we must work on our relationship with the written word. The more we nurture our reading 'muscle' the stronger it gets. Even good readers benefit from reading more and more.
   
9. Encourage children to find something that will interest them. introduce them to various genres early rather than late. So while one child might find fantasy of fairy tales alluring, another might be captivated by mystery or a heady mix of adventure and fantasy in the Rainbow Fairies series that my daughter picked up voraciously. Once a child has found something of interest- give more and more and more. Keep the fire burning!
10. Words can be converted into 'buildings by making lines around the letters creating a profile of the word. Thus /word/ would end in a tall tower while /verb/ would have the tall tower trailed by a small box at the end! These and other ingenious games introduce the children to the several cues they can use to beat reading difficulties when they do occur.
    

Identifying a struggling reader

Dyslexia is a widely used and as widely 'un'- understood term of the modern day education system. Many use the term to denote several different disabilities. This is the classical Humpty Dumpty situation of Alice in Wonderand. Humpty Dumpty had, in a gruff and summary manner told Alice that the words he used meant what HE wanted them to mean. Nothing more and nothing less. Nothing else! I may mean something and say it; yet I cannot hope to be understood if my words mean something else altogether to the reader.

The first step, then, is to identify those children who might need attention, even special attention.

There are a few children who can make sense of the various phonemic representations in English without noticing the paradoxes. The language has come naturally to these children and the automaticity of reading is well estabilshed. These children rapidly move higher along Bloom's heirarchy and face little or no challenge in reading tasks.

There are some children, however, who cannot figure out why Sir and Cir-cle both make the 'sur' sound. They are decoding rather than reading. They have to be helped to move beyond the stage of decoding into fluency. For these children, the sight word lists would necessarily include these few words that strictly do not follow phonics. It is also helpful to do word groups like CIRCLE and CIRCUS to reinforce the letter combinations like CIR. Several such combinations can be worked out by any teacher who spends only a vfew minutes on levelled readers.

Thus, children who have reached the level of the short vowel sound can progress to long vowel sound. Thereafter, they can move on to letter combinations like SH, and CH. This makes it easy for the child to progress from HIP to SHIP and CHIP. The problem comes for the child who cannot decode HIP!

These initial letter combinations then make way for letter blends- BL, BR, TR etc. Now, the child progresses from LACK to BLACK or TRACK easily. It is always more effective to provide a context and a peg for the child to retain this memory. So it does not help very greatly to simply say ( or write) all these words for the child and expect him to remember not only the words but also make sense of their usage. The strategy I follow is to read the levelled readers with the children. This provides the context. From the levelled reader I pick up any one ( or a few- upto three) letter combinations and write down the high frequency words that follow the same phonemic principles for the children. This provides the story as a start. The word from the story provides the context and the remaining words can be pegged to this word as an aid memoire.

The steps to follow, then for the bveginning reader are:

1. Alphabet names and sound recognition.
2. Introduction of the vowel sounds through rhymes like Old Mac Donald
3. Short vowel sounds - BAT, BET, BIT, POT, BUT
   
4. Long vowel sounds- MAT- MATE, MET- METE, BIT- BITE, DOT-DOTE, CUT- CUTE
5. Letter combinations- SH- Ship, Shock, Shape, Shake
6. Note here that the above words can be used as starters for another journey! SHIP- HIP, SHOCK-ROCK, DOCK, LOCK. Your imagination and the child's pace of picking up the new sounds is the only limiting factor!
   

For beginning readers, try to find or make (Yes! more about this in just a little while) books that follow the following principles:

1. One to three words per page, ten to fifteen pages in all
2. One word change per page
3. High frequency words
4. Words from day to day activities of the child.
   
5. Easy to follow rules of phonics. Avoid sight words at the very beginning. Gradually ease into sight words in an age appropriate manner
   

The first baby steps...

Now that the foundations are laid, we may proceed further.

Making sure that the children are ready for the not always easy task of reading and trying to keep it fun and undaunting are prerequisites to a good reading ( or beginning to read) program.

I have been a voracious reader. I devoured books- my love affair started when I was still in pre-primary or kindergarten. The lovely picture books invited me into a world I could not visit physically. The words had a musical quality for me. I may have been sounding them out ( a little more of that later. We will address different learning styles to make learning to read an effective process) and therefore, have still the memories of early words I read.

In class I, when other children were taking early tottering steps in trying to make sense of school text books, I was reading outside the curriculum simply because I loved it! To top it all, we had a teacher who knew not a word of our first language. She was Mrs Nair, a tall, somewhat heavy woman from south India who spoke even English in a heavy south Indian accent. To say the least, she was difficult to understand. For mere six year olds, it was a difficult task. I became the interpreter by default! I could read and speak both Hindi and English, fluently. And I loved the opportunity to be able to do something extra that many others in the class could not do.

In short, reading was a natural talent. I never really faced any difficulty or struggle.

Take a different scenario. A few years preceding my linguistic adventures, another child was trying very hard to fit into a system he found difficult. He could not make much sense of the squiggles people called print and did not want to write. He was not lazy. He was not intellectually impaired. He could learn most of what was read to him without difficulty. However, if he were to read it himself, his eyes had to go back to the beginning of sentences to re-read and form a continuity that kept breaking despite best efforts. This boy, somewhere along the way figured out how to crack the code and went on to top the Medical entrance exam, and further to earn himself a Gold medal in a field that required tremendous hand eye co-ordination as well as fine motor control that is precise and LASER like in quality! He became an eye surgeon.

I am relating my husband's childhood and mine. Two very different skill sets. It was impossible for me to understand the existence of an entity called struggling reader, let alone accept the fact that such a fun activity can indeed be tiring for anyone!

Needless to say, I have struggled with the realisation that reading may not be easy for some children. My daughter finds it tiring to read and write. She is a brilliant girl who is multi-talented and does several activities with an enviable proficiency. She, however, finds it just a little bit too much of a task to read and somewhat more so to write.

Her grasp of verbal instructions and her early efforts to fit into the schooling system made her a teacher's pet. This made the identification even more difficult.

The baby steps then in beginning to read are really in first identifying when and which child is ready to read.

My son began early and revelled in each new successful attempt. So... I have experienced a child who has had a degree of difficulty and one who has had it rather easy in terms of beginning to read.

The first baby steps involve BEING INVOLVED with your children. Provide a rich linguistic experience to them. Read books. Sing songs. Carry on conversations. Introduce words. The more words we are able to give to a child BEFORE he/ she enters the school, easier is the transition into reading.

Most children respond well enough to the early story reading attempts and begin to 'read' the story by rote! Encourage these early decoding attempts. A full throated Hurray! goes a long way in keeping the child at the task of reading. Much longer any way than a blunt or mute response to failed or partially successful attempts to read.
The children will begin to form a visual impression of teh early words that can serve as building blocks for further progress. The first 'o' leads quite easily to 'no', 'go' and 'so'. Then we can move on to 'to', and 'do'. The children always laugh at the travesty of the language that treats the same symbols so differently. But they have formed a memory peg to start their journey. These words often do not pose any problem for the beginners.

The phonics way is my preferred way to go beyond these early attempts. I would suggest introducing the concept of vowels through such poems as Old Mac Donald and creating awareness of the short vowel sound to start with. The concept of 'bat', 'bet', 'bit', 'pot' and 'but' is not very difficult to teach. It is helpful to make an alphabetical grid and help the child along for these early sounds...

'at' sound

1. bat
2. cat
3. fat
4. hat
5. mat
6. pat
7. rat
8. sat

The next steps depend upon and are decided by how well these early steps are taken. Bat could well transform into battle or cat into cattle if the phonics and phonology are clearly laid out for the child.

Struggling readers may need more time and different strategies. These are not difficult, only different. These children are not stupid, they are different! They are smart. And they are tenacious. They hang on to their self esteem despite realising that they may become the butt of class jokes. Or they may crumble.

Early attempts at teaching and learning can define the direction that a child takes.

ANY CHILD CAN LEARN HOW TO READ.

We can help the process. We must.

learning to read!

Learning to read can be an exciting adventure for some children and an extremely difficult decoding exercise for a few others. It falls on the shoulders of the care-givers how they would approach each and how best they inculcate the reading habit in the young. It is this ability... skill, if you may, that is a prerequisite for performance in a majority of tasks later in life. Unless a child decides to become a Dancer or a Barista, he or she will need to read (and write) in most life situations. And he may need to do so even in the two mentioned choices.

Early reading is typically a fun exercise of recognition and recall. A child first begins to recognise the letters of the alphabet and understand that they denote separate sounds. These sounds can be put together and new sound combinations are produced. Each time a sound combination is put on paper, it says the same thing. These revelations may be unrecognised but are dramatically coded into a reading ( or early reading ) brain. The facts that the typical print is read from left to right ( except Urdu and some related languages when it is read from right to left) and that the page has a right side up which does not change are indeed vital pre-reading skills that make reading a possibility.

The human brain was not built to read. In fact, reading (and writing) are skills acquired very late in our evolutionary life. It was as recent as perhaps 6000 years ago that we learned to wrire and read while we have been around for nearly five lakh years. The areas of the brain that light up when we simply visualise certain shapes on a surface are the areas of the visual cortex at the back of the head- The occipital cortex. However, when we recognise these squiggles to be symbols denoting sounds, a virtual forest fire starts off in the brain, lighting up several areas radiating from the visual cortex and involving right up to the front in the frontal cortex and also involves, significantly the language area of the brain hidden in the temporal cortex. There are, thus, no specific neurons involved in the task (or the skill) of reading but several connections that have evolved over the past few centuries making language a refined system of communication in its written and spoken form.

Reading does not start automatically. It has to be taught. Once the process has kicked in, however, reading is so automatic that it really cannot be turned off!

Reading has been traditionally taught by two major methods- the whole language method and the phonics method. Both have their supporters and detractors. As a mother who is a voracious reader and who has taught two enormously different kids how to read, I would like to propose a good and heady mix of both, blending them into an elixir that the child finds almost as exciting as chocolate!

The phonics method teaches the child how to read letter sounds rather than letter names ( aa, b, k) and then build from short vowel sounds ( cat, ten, hit, pot,bun) and moving onto combinations or blends. It is an extremely effective method for early readers. The children are always excited at being able to decode newer words on their own simply because these consistently follow the phonics principle. So the child rapidly and dramatically progresses from mat to mate to material and the thrill is matched by acquisition of few other acquired skills.

At the same time, it helps the child to understand that the English language does not always follow this principle and introduce them to the concept of sight words. The earliest sight words introduced to children are often number names and the simple words he, she, be, to do, no, go, so. As the child advances in his skill, so does he in acquiring new and more complex sight words.

Both these methods rely heavily on the child's ability to retain and recall from memory. Thus, a child who knows the words in spoken language finds it much easier to recognise them and form memories for the written representation. Thus, early reading skills are greatly helped by the exposure to a rich linguistic environment at home sooner better than later. The habit of reading stories especially bedtime stories to children exposes them to new words and magical journeys. The words they hear are the words they will be able to recognise and read much easier.

Brightly coloured picture books that introduce a few words and use the method of repeating them ( especially good are the Early readers of the Ladybird series- Chicken Licken!) exploit this principle to the fullest and produce fluent readers almost effortlessly.

There are a few who need more effort than simply recognising the print. These children need special and patient teaching.

Reading may be better understood as being composed of three main components- decoding, comprehension and retention. Decoding itself is a highly complex neural activity. This involves perception of the written signal ( letter) , identifying it, putting the several letters together, 'speaking' the same group together in the mind and then constructing a word out of all these activities. Then comes the difficult task of remembering each preceding word with the next, retaining it in the short term, making sense of each word combination- making meaningful sentences out of the written material.

That does not look too simple, does it?

Therefore, the earliest beginnings to promoting reading lie in preparing good pre-reading skills, building reading from phonics, helping with sight words and repeating, repeating, repeating.

Most importantly, material selected for these early readers and pre-readers MUST be colourful and fun, exciting and enticing.

So- go ahead and enjoy the early tottering steps in the road to reading with as many smiles and as much support as you do for early walking trials of the little ones. Be patient and encouraging and allow the children to proceed at their own pace. Do remeber that those who cannot see or hear properly may not be able to acquire language easily and it is extremely important to see a specialist ( Eye/ ENT doctors) who may identify an organic cause of failure to acquire these skills by otherwise able children.