Seattle Press on Line - Teaching Your Child to Read

Body and Soul

Teaching Your Child to Read

By Pieter Drummond

Recommended Reading for Parents and Teachers

Straight Talk About Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference During the Early Years by Susan L. Hall and Louisa C. Moats Ed.D, 1999, Contemporary Books: Chicago, IL.

Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide by Lucy Calkins and Lydia Bellino, 1997, Perseus Books: Reading, MA.

Process Assessment of the Learner: Guides For Intervention Reading and Writing by Virginia Wise Berninger, 1998, Psychological Corporation: San Antonio, TX.

Off Track: When Poor Readers Become "Learning Disabled" by Louise Spear-Swerling and Robert J. Sternberg, 1996, Westview Press: Boulder, CO.

How Parents Can Develop Readers

How can parents help their children develop good reading habits?

Decrease competition by setting limits on television and computer games, but don't make reading the culprit. Instead provide reading as an option.

Choose books that feed your child's interests. If your child shows interest in the Titanic give her books about ship building and icebergs and sea life in cold waters. If your child adores Harry Potter then nudge her toward books from authors with similar writing styles.

Avoid supplying books for independent reading that are too difficult. If a book is too difficult, reading becomes a frustrating, meaningless jumble. Check a book's appropriateness by whether or not your child can accurately recognize more than 90 percent of the words and easily retell the gist of the text.

Model your own reverence for reading. A parent of two boys, Lucy Calkins, provides an example. When her boys asked her what she wanted for her birthday she replied, "A great book of course, because nothing in life gives me greater pleasure than reading." Lucy also makes sure that her boys are aware of the details of her personal reading life. They know that before every vacation she visits the bookstore and buys two or three books for leisure reading and that she starts each day before work by reading the newspaper.

Ritual is another way to make everyday activities special. Lucy has a set family reading time each day. When this reading time starts, family members go to their special reading nooks in the house with special reading lamps and special bookmarkers. Lucy found that a little bit of ritual each day helped reading become more of a habit. Now this family reading time has become the norm. Her boys not only see reading as something unusually special, they think of themselves as people who read often, every day.

In order to succeed in making your child a reader, you must make reading a pleasurable experience. If your child has trouble starting a book, read aloud just enough to get her into the plot and spark her interest. Then let the child take over, but remain at hand if your child needs help. If your child has difficulty completing longer chapter books, read aloud every third chapter so she can stay with the same book to its completion.

In the third and fourth grades, school becomes more demanding. For many children reading changes from sitting with family in the living room to sitting alone at their desk in their room. When children are at this age, it is important for parents to stay engaged. Reading aloud is still important. It makes reading social and provides the opportunity for parents to teach older children comprehension strategies important for middle school. For example, if you detect foreshadowing in a novel you can make a prediction for your child. When reading a confusing part of a passage, you can show your strategies for deciphering the text.

There is no quick fix to get a child to read more. Developing a habit is a result of repeating a behavior consistently over a long period of time. Through action comes increased interest and motivation.

Jul 12, 2000 -- Everyone knows that reading is important.

It can be one of the greatest pleasures in life. Reading allows us to walk in the shoes of another person, to think and feel what they feel. It helps us to understand why others do what they do. In stories, through the union of the author's words and our interpretation, vivid worlds are created. No other media provides such a poignant experience, not movies, not video games, not interactive web sites, not even the IMAX theatre.

Reading is also one of the greatest tools in life. Through reading we develop knowledge and skills that enable us to enhance our quality of life and our contribution to society.

We become good readers by reading a lot. Some people have likened learning to read to the saying, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." The better the reader, the more likely she will read. The more she reads the better she becomes. But what about poor readers? Some very smart people have trouble learning to read. In turn, they end up being less exposed to reading and become increasingly "poor" in comparison with their peers. What can be done to help poor readers?

Matt is a typical sixteen-year-old. He drives a car, plays on the school soccer team and attends school dances. What people do not realize is that Matt is a poor reader. When I first met Matt, I was surprised by his immense anxiety, shame and guilt associated with his reading difficulties. Matt blamed himself for being a poor reader.

When he was young his mother expressed her concern to his teachers. Because Matt performed well in all other activities, his kindergarten and first grade teachers assumed that he was simply experiencing a developmental lag—Matt just needed a little more time to catch up. So Matt's parents waited. In the second grade, a teacher told Matt's parents that they were not reading aloud to him often enough. So Matt's parents read aloud to him until they were "blue in the face." In the third grade, having made little progress in reading, Matt was tested by the school psychologist and was found to have a reading disability. Matt would have had more success if, at the beginning of his academic career, he had received specific instruction to develop his pre-reading skills.

Whether a child has a reading disability or is simply experiencing difficulty learning to read, we can improve her chances for success by developing two important pre-reading skills: alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Put simply, alphabetic knowledge refers to knowing the letters of the alphabet and the speech sounds commonly associated with these letters; phonemic awareness is the ability to manage individual speech sounds. This includes the ability to segment a spoken word into sound parts, and then blend these individual sounds together, such as segmenting the word stop into four speech sounds /suh/ /tuh/ /ahh/ /puh/. When children are learning to read, phonemic awareness facilitates their ability to sound out words, an important stage of reading. Some early warning signs that a child needs more specific instruction can be difficulty with sequencing numbers and words and difficulty rhyming and learning the alphabet. I also monitor to see whether the child is developing effective strategies for sounding out words. In the first grade it is normal for children to confuse words when reading, however, by the end of the second grade they should be able to accurately recognize most words in their vocabulary.

Through this early process parents can play an important role. They can act as reading coaches and as advocates for their children, making sure they receive proper instruction. In addition to reading aloud, parents can help their children develop alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness. While knowledge of the alphabet is pretty straightforward, phonemic awareness is more elusive. One useful activity is a simple word game where children are asked to repeat a word and then say it again only this time changing one of the sounds in the word. For example, ask the child to say the word "dog" and then say it again changing the sound /guh/ to /tuh/ (changing dog to dot). One study shows that almost 20 percent of children need this specific instruction.

Teachers and other adults who work with children should be trained to systematically teach these pre-reading skills. Dr. Virginia Berninger of the University of Washington has conducted important research in learning disabilities from which she created a program to develop literacy skills including alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Teachers are being trained and the program is now being implemented in some Seattle schools.

We are now in the era of evidence-based education. Scientific research is finding concrete solutions to the reading dilemma. Now, it is up to the rest of us to prevent more stories like Matt's by putting research into practice.

Pieter Drummond received his Masters Degree in Learning Disabilities from Columbia University in New York where he also worked with inner city youth. He now has a private practice providing specialized instruction, consultation and workshops in reading and learning disabilities. You can reach Pieter Drummond at (206) 769-6795 or drummondlearning@msn.com.

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