Teach Your Child to Read Before Kindergarten
The Video
I am tempted to save this juicy information and make one of those videos; you know which ones I mean. The “and if you order right now, you’ll not only get our video for $29.99, but we’ll throw in this fancy-shmancy-worth-over-$100.00-coloring-book for free” kind.
Expecting
Okay, I confess; I was one of those pregnant moms who read a bunch of books during my pregnancy that had titles like “How to Raise a Really Bright Child,” and “How to Stimulate Your Baby’s Brain by Hanging Loud-Colored Fuzzy Things Over the Crib and Playing the Sesame Street Theme Song Backwards. And yes, a lot of the ideas in those books ranged from mundane and old hat to outright loony. But there were diamonds in the coal mine as well.
And I confess that I was one of those pregnant moms that spent approximately 10% of my time daydreaming about how my kid would be class valedictorian of her graduating class at age two, go on to Medical School and become a real-life Doogie Howser at the ripe old age of thirteen. Of course, right now my twelve-year old daughter is in her bedroom working on her 8th grade homework and the only doctor I’m seeing this week is my gynecologist.
Expectations
Now, maybe you are thinking that you are going to read this article and then your kid will be the next three-year old on the Believe it or Not Show (or maybe your personal preference is Oprah), reading all the flashcards with names of highly advanced neurological diseases that you don’t even know how to pronounce yet. If that’s the case, stop reading right here.
On the other hand, if you are thinking that it would be really neat-o if your babbling and drooling little bundle of joy would take an early liking to books and maybe be able to read you a bedtime story or two in a few years, then keep reading. Especially if you are on a budget and want to know how it can be done for next to nothing in monetary terms.
Please note that this author respects the fact that all children learn at different paces. Therefore there are no hard and fast age guidelines set forth in the following article; just a general process that is assumed to be spread out anywhere from ages 0-5.
Basic Skill
The most basic, but also most necessary, skill that you will need for this commitment is the ability to praise the efforts of your child. Sing, laugh, clap, or do a happy a dance if that’s your thing, but do something to let her know how pleased you are with what she’s doing.
Surround Sound
Sounds, they’re everywhere. And a lot of them seem to burst forth from the human mouth. Before your baby is even born, your voice will be a familiar sound, and one that he or she will respond to and be comforted by. (Unless of course, you spend your whole pregnancy yelling and screeching, in which case your baby just might lie awake at night, wishing she knew how to count so that she could estimate how many days must pass before she can move out.)
Be Multi-lingual
From the very beginning, it is important to talk to your baby very often. Baby-talk and cooing are fine and dandy, but don’t let those be the only languages your baby hears from you. She’ll be listening and learning from your tone (as well as your volume) when you speak to people, learning how you communicate with those other really tall people who keep leaning their gigantic faces down so close to hers and saying profound things like “Coochy-coochy-coo, did da baby make a tinky poo-poo?”
A good habit to get into is using baby-talk for miscellaneous things that come up in the day and conversational tone for things that happen repeatedly in her world; for instance, making her bottle, a diaper change, getting dressed. Point to yourself when you use the word Mommy and to her when you are saying her name. Hold up the diaper and explain what you are doing with it. When you are making her bottle, if she is old enough to sit in the high chair and watch, go through the motions slowly, taking time to repeat the key words in the process. The key words must always be tangible. If the sentence is “Now Mommy is putting on your shoes.” Focus on the words Mommy and shoes, the things that she can see and feel. “Putting” is far too abstract at this time.
When your baby coos and creates sounds that might someday translate into real words, pretend that they already do. If you are making her bottle and she looks up at you and says “gah goo mmm pah bah ooh,” reply with something like “Yes! You are right! This is the same Barney bottle that you had yesterday at breakfast!” The point of this is to help the baby understand that the same words she hears you use are also available to her.
The Scoffers
Expect to take a little flak from people now and then. I know I had to. I was told many times that I was “neurotic” and “wasting my time.” And if I only had a dime for each time I heard “Don’t you know she’s just a baby?” As if that may have slipped my mind.
I can hardly explain the satisfaction I felt when a friend (who had teased me mercifully about all those books I read and all my babbling at my infant) was visiting with her one year old. I discovered a wet diaper and set my daughter on the ground, asking her to please bring Mommy a diaper. I repeated it several times and stressed the words Mommy and diaper. My friend made one of those snort-scoff sounds and reminded me that the baby was only six-months old. I just smiled as my she crawled off to the diaper stack and returned with a fresh one (to heaps of praise, of course). Yes, it was all worth it.
Beyond the Bottles Already
Do not despair if your child is already beyond the baby stage; any child of any age can learn to read. Your job is simply to help them along by fostering their natural curiosity and desire to learn and cultivating an easy-going environment to do that in. The easy-going part cannot be stressed enough. Under no circumstance do you want the child to feel forced to read, or discouraged about the process. Pressure and stress will be counterproductive. If you start early enough, kids don’t even know they are learning to read, it just happens.
Read, Read, Read
If your child is still chewing everything, you can do the following for a shorter period of time (attention span issues) with cloth books. When your child is beyond the “I want to feel everything I see by placing it inside my mouth” phase, get yourself in a comfortable to place to read a magazine and give her one of your old ones to “read” alongside of you. Do this even if your child has her own collection of age-appropriate reading materials. Besides exposing to her to a variety of ways that words are compiled, it gives her that sense of “I’m just like my role model” that is so precious to children in the early years, even though the same thought starts making them nauseous a little over a decade later.
Set aside a portion of each day to read her children’s books to her. Many parents choose the traditional “bedtime story” (more than one is better), but that doesn’t have to be the time you choose and you can certainly have more than one story time a day. Run your fingers along the words as you read them, helping her approach the revelation that the marks on the page are connected to the words coming out of your mouth. When she asks you to read the same book every single night, don’t balk; she is enjoying the repetition. A good way to approach this is to let the child choose one book and you choose one book.
Read to your baby all the time. No, I don’t mean give up housework (wouldn’t that be nice) to read the Cat in the Hat from nine to five, I mean let her be a part of your reading experience throughout the day. If you are at the grocery store, show her words on the cereal box, the bag of diapers, the formula can, the sale signs, and whatever else you run into.
Let your baby see that reading is important to you. You do this by taking time each day to read. It can be a book, a newspaper, cards from your recipe box, mail�anything at all.
It’s Not an “A,” it’s an “Aah”
If your child is far enough along that she can pick out the apple on the page, or the frog, or whatever other pictures are found in the baby books that she has been chewing on, she is far enough a long to start learning phonics.
Not to be confused with the alphabet and the song about knowing her ABCs, phonics is all about the sound of the letters and letter combinations. Flashcards become your new tool. It’s not necessary to go out and buy the most expensive set you see in the educational section of the drugstore either. For the most part, those are not only a waste of money, but they tend to have too many distracting pictures on them. If a child can point out an apple by remembering the word (sound) with the picture, the same child can remember a stand-alone sound with a picture. There is no need for the apple to emphasize the “a” sound found at its beginning.
Simply pick up a pack of plain white index cards and draw bubble or block style letters on them. Create the first set with lowercase letters and use various bright colors. If your child is a little older, let her color in the letters while you talk about all the words that start with that sound. Turn it into a game.
Teach the sounds in the same way you taught the apple and the frog. Show her the letter, and say its sound. Not the name of the letter, the sound.
Introduce only a few sounds at a time, and begin with the short form of the vowels. Example: cat, hit, pet, cot, rut. After the short vowels are soaked up it’s time to move on to the consonants. Avoid confusion by introducing distinctly different sounds and appearances each time. For instance, do not use the same lesson to launch “m” and “n” or “b” and “d.” Instead, introduce “m” and “b.”
The new sights and sounds you initiate each week will be based on your assessment of your child’s individual progress. As a general rule, younger children are easily introduced to hard c (cat), hard g (go), m, l, b, f, t, and n.
It may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to really grasp each set; don’t rush. This foundation time is crucial. If your child is able to use a crayon with some semblance of control, take some blank paper and create your own worksheets. This is nothing more than using a pencil to draw rows and rows of the sounds you are working on this week. Set her up with some crayons or pens and show her how to trace the letters, remembering to say each sound every time she does one. Be sure to compliment the artwork.
It is also a good idea to create a second set of cards with the same letters to play the card game “memory.” Turn all the cards face down and take turns flipping them over two at a time in search of pairs. Say the sound of each letter when the card is flipped over. If the cards don’t match, they must be returned to their original face-down position. If they do match, they go to the person who discovered them and when all the cards are gone, the one with the most pairs wins.
When the child is armed with an arsenal of sounds and able to identify them quickly, begin introducing simple words that use the core sounds. Example: take those white index cards with the beautifully colored letters and create the word cat. At first, keep the letters spread out and slowly point to each one. Then move the letters closer together and pick up the pace. Continue doing this until the letters are right next to each other. Then do it again with another word.
Try to restrain yourself from pointing out to the child that it is a word. It will be worth it when you see that little face light up with the recognition that the sounds she can make by sight (read) come together as a “real” word. And make no mistake about it, that recognition will come.
At that point, the hard part is over. When you are cooking dinner, your child will be creating words with her index cards. When you are in the shower, she will come in wanting to show you the word she just found “all by her own self” in a book. And she will read the books she can sound out, over and over again. This is a good time to take a break and pat yourself (along with anyone else who contributed to the effort) on the back. Take a breather and enjoy the melodic sounds of Dr. Seuss a couple hundred times, and then get back to teaching.
You are over the hump. The most challenging part at this point seems to be the long vowels. Example: here, mate, tote, bite, flute. This is the time to introduce the word “vowels” and the names of the vowels. Then the mantra for this moment becomes: if there’s an “e” at the end, then the first vowel says its own name. Practice this for at least three times as long as you did any lesson prior, even if your child seems to have caught on.
Then move on to sound combinations often found at the beginning and end of words, such as sh, ch, th. Combinations such as nt (ant), st (step, pest), nd (and), rt (cart), and those similar will work themselves out.
Now move on to the simple mid-word combinations such as ee (feet), oo (root), etc. Then the slightly more complicated ones like ai (rain), ea (fear), oi (boil), etc.
At this point, you might want to start talking about word context, or “how it fits into the sentence.” A good introduction to the concept is the ea combination in a comparison of fear and bear. If this proves to be too complicated at the moment, push it to the backburner and go back to what is comfortable. It will all fall together.
To Stress or Not to Stress
Don’t stress yourself or your child out. Learning to read should be a fun and rewarding experience.
Do stress how proud you are of your child, how impressed you are with their reading, how much you enjoy hearing them read, and how much you love her. Especially how much you love her, after all, that’s even more important than reading.
A Better Ending than the Diaper Story
Okay, what can I say, I’m a Mom like every other-I like to brag about my kid. So I’m going to end this with a story from kindergarten, that still makes my heart swell up and my eyes tear up.
My daughter was born in late December and many well-meaning (but completely out of touch with my life and child) people suggested that I hold her back a year so she wouldn’t enter school so young. I didn’t take their (often unsolicited) advice and enrolled her anyway. Then they told me I’d be sorry when she “falls behind and needs to repeat a year.” I brushed off these unfounded fears, confident in my child’s abilities and her foundation.
At the first parent-teacher conference of the year, the teacher informed me what a “wonderful treat” it was to have my daughter in her class. When she needed that “extra moment” to grade papers or prepare for their next project, she would ask my daughter to read a story to the class. Not only did this validate my daughter’s confidence in her own reading abilities, but it encouraged the other kids to want to learn. After all, they reasoned, if she can learn to read like that, I can too!
Now ask me if I wanted to burst with pride. Ask me if those countless hours of creating my own worksheets and flashcards were worth it. Ask me if I’d sit through Green Eggs and Ham another million times. The answer is yes, yes, and yes!
