What is the Best Way to Teach a (Young) Child to Read?

Factual Questions
21

I’ve read a fair amount of the research that discredits Lucy Calkins/balanced literacy, and I’ve taught under her curricula. My observations, which are anecdotal:

  1. Lucy Calkins works really well for the kinds of kids who will grow up to become next generation’s Lucy Calkins: kids who are highly motivated by the written word and by memoirs and who like the sound of their own voices. For other kids it doesn’t work so well.
  2. Phonics-forward programs work really well for kids who struggle to learn how to read and who don’t necessarily intuit some of the pieces about how language works. They work okay for the great majority of kids, and, judiciously used, they can even work for the Lucy Calkins kids of the world.
  3. Too much phonics can kill a child’s love of reading. However, the reading metrics used in the world of education almost never study the love of reading; on the contrary, the metrics themselves are soul-killers, like, three-hour-long multiple choice tests the likes of which it’s painful to sit through as an adult. Our datamancers don’t always ask whether they’re measuring the right thing, only asking whether they’re measuring the measurable thing.
  4. Kids who struggle with reading can have their love of reading fanned by phonics, because it lets them access a skill they couldn’t otherwise access.

In other words, I advise caution in applying the giant meta-studies to an individual child. If you have a kid who’s ready to read, that suggests to me that heavy phonics might not be best for that child. Instead, what you’re doing is working for your child. Incorporate instruction in phonics where it seems helpful, but don’t feel like you need to break from what’s working because American Public Media says so.

But for god’s sake stay away from Lucy Calkins.

22

I could read simple sentences at the start of elementary school. My parents did read to me, and I especially remember sitting on Dad’s lap while he read the Sunday comics. So some of the first words I could read came from the comic strip…bang!..wow!..wham!

23

I was read to as a child. A lot. I was also taught the sounds that the various letters made. On my own I guessed that the way to read was to say the sounds of the letters in a word, all in a row. Then I taught myself to read with comic books. (Magnus, Robot Fighter was the first.)

In first grade (early 1960s) students were divided into reading groups based on our skill level. I was one of the faster readers, and I remember overhearing the teacher tell the “Basic” group, to look at the shape of the word to read it. She had them circle words and memorize the shapes: the “look-say” method. Six-year-old me thought it was a moronic approach.

When I tutored reading in high school, I saw a dichotomy in the group of 11th-graders. Some were able to “sound out” an unfamiliar word and eventually (sometimes painfully) turn “Luh” “Eh” “Ss” “Ss” into “less.” Others were generally a little faster, but if “less” was unfamiliar, would start guessing, “lean?” "low? “learn?”

The “look-say” method taught an approximation of what experienced readers end up doing on their own: perceiving the word as a whole. But over-reliance on that, without some grounding in phonics, left these kids floundering.

24

An interesting side note - both northern aboriginal and Inuit groups have their own syllabic alphabet. As I understand, it was made up by one of the earlier missionaries to the Cree (?) to reflect their phonetics. A history I read of the language mentioned that it spread because when one person met another, they could teach them to read in an afternoon.

Of course, an important thing to keep in mind is brain atrophy, since tech is affecting it more. Pre-literate people had very good memory because that’s all they had to rely on. Now, we don’t need to remember stuff, we can write it down. With newer toys, we don’t even have to remember things like appointments or phone numbers, the phone or computer does it. Every so often when I use Google, I wonder how I managed before it.

But the idea that you could show someone an alphabet of two dozen or so symbols and a few rules over an afternoon, and they could remember it and use it - says something about the power of the human brain.

25

Unsurprisingly an excellent post on this subject.

First a general impression. Kids who are ready to read early seem to just need exposure and access. They are not the ones who benefit most from phonics explicitly.

Next a more broad point. @Spice_Weasel whether or not your child fits a specific label, you are describing a child with uneven development. Every child has a finite amount of developmental energy to divvy between the different buckets. Yours is, relative to typical, putting a bit less in some, and more in others. There is not necessarily anything wrong with that, including for those who get labeled as ASD. I wouldn’t discourage any specific interest. I’m not sure though that explicitly encouraging them to put more into the buckets with the most is a great idea.

To me the most important reading related activity for this child is encouraging him to him to dialogue with you about what he has just “read”, to talk back forth about what you are reading together when he allows for that, including having him guess what happens next, both next word (predicting the rhyme or even a sight word he might know) and in the story.

IF he is ASD then this ends up as more important as it facilitates both future reading comprehension and social pragmatics.

26

He’s to the point where he knows all the words in the books and can finish the rhymes. We do that. He’s able to point out the things he sees, but he is for the most part not able to answer questions. For example, his opening volley would be “Three bears!” or even “Three bears in a cave!” And if I said, “What are the bears doing?” I don’t think he could respond to that. If I were lucky, he might respond, “Sleeping bears in a cave.” That’s kind of what I mean by communication issues. He can talk, even in complete sentences, but it’s mostly observational. I don’t think he understands how conversations work. And I don’t know if that’s something that will click for him eventually, or will require intervention. It’s difficult when you have no experience with kids that age other than the one kid you have.

But we are definitely working on finding out what we can do for him. So it could be those other pieces need to be in place before the reading clicks for him.

27

You are describing my daughter a lot. She doesn’t take conversational turns. When you ask her how her day was, she doesn’t ask how yours was.

It’s also part of why she doesn’t test well. She doesn’t intuit well. She’ll see the picture of Sally getting wet in the rain but won’t predict that the next part of the story will be Sally coming in to change into dry clothes.

28

Again, no idea whether or you not your son will end up getting an ASD label but yes, continuing to work on the conversational bits, trying to expand on even his small answers, is the priority. In general talking about how this causes that. One more extreme version that you might related to are kids with hyperlexia.

These are kids, often with autistic features, who read far above age level very early, many of whom who however have very poor compression of what they read. Some, especially those with poor comprehension, go on to develop more autistic features; some, especially those with better comprehension, resolve from their autistic-like behaviors.

Speech language therapy to work on higher order language skills and social skills is a key intervention for those children.

29

From what I’ve seen watching my two boys learn to read is that there really seem to be two types of reading or maybe even three. There’s what I’d call “sight reading”, where the kids recognize the entire word at a glance and don’t have to sound it out phonetically. Then there’s phonics, where they literally sound out the letters in the word one at a time. Generally most kids (people?) read by sight, unless they encounter something that they don’t know at which they flip to phonics to sound it out.

The reason I said “maybe even three” types of reading is that I’ve seen them doing a sort of hybrid of the two at times, where they know by sight that clusters of letters are specific syllables, suffixes/prefixes, etc… and not sounding out each word letter-by-letter, but more syllable-by-syllable . So a word like “intervention” is “inter”, “ven” and “tion”, rather than i-n-t-e-r-v-e-n-t-i-o-n.

In school they tend to formally teach the first couple, but AFAIK the third is more of an emergent property of knowing the first two, except for prefixes and suffixes, which they do teach specifically.

30

I’m very interested in this topic because my five-year-old son is in kindergarten. His teacher sent a notice out that they’re starting to move into reading as curriculum. Previously, it was letter names and sounds and a few key words (the, yes, no, etc.), so at least a little bit of phonics. I really hope they don’t use the three cues method.

As an elementary student in the mid-80s, I was taught a dedicated phonics system. It made total sense to me, and I became a fast reader. I was also read to a lot. My wife was not taught phonics as she can remember and wasn’t read to. Combined with undiagnosed farsightedness until just a few years ago meant she still still struggles to read quickly. (Comprehension is fine, it’s the literal act of reading the letters.)

I read to my kid every night before bed. I’m sure it will help with his reading, but I know it’s having an impact. Last weekend he was doing a little puppet show for us. He did different voices for each character and put in breaks and used his normal voice to say, “he said” before continuing. That’s just how I sound when I read. I’m proud of my multitude of voices, but I still read exactly what’s on the page, including the identifying dialog breaks that are not necessary with the voices.

31

Yeah, I think this is probably how I do it/how I learned. It’s amazing to think we can be doing that instantaneously, especially because reading and writing is not innate behavior the way language is.

32

My word was “facetious.” I’d seen it when reading and had never known how to say it. I think I had the emphasis on the first syllable. Anyway, I was a sarcastic kid, and mom was always saying “Don’t be facetious.” I can still remember the aha! moment when I made the connection between that word written and spoken.

33

My word was “mariner,” as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I found out it wasn’t ma-REEN-er when all the kids laughed when I was reading the poem out loud. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

I don’t remember my parents reading to me, but my mom definitely read to my son, so she must have read to me, right? I started reading on my own very early. I started reading to my son from the get-go, and I was frustrated that he didn’t like to read much. Then I introduced him to Stephen King at around 10, and he never looked back. His vocabulary was phenomenal compared to his peers. He still reads for pleasure - he’s 38. :wink:

I guess my suggestion would be to find a genre or topic that interests your child and get out of their way! I would also suggest that instead of you reading to them, they read to you and you help if they ask.

34

My Mom started me on comic strips.
A better vocabulary, & it keeps the attention better than “Run Spot! Run!”
Which, BTW, sounds like a dry cleaning error.

35

I don’t remember being read to - but had a plethora of books. My grandmother sent us a Bobbsey Twins book (oh, those British) and I remember sitting down to read it one day, I think about Grade 2, and realizing after about two hours - “Wow! I just read a whole real book.” 100 pages of normal sized type, no pictures. My parents encouraged me to go to the library, but rarely looked at what I was reading. I was hitting up the adult SF and mystery sections in the library by grade 5. Nothing wakes up your reading like the Simon Templar series.

We had my grandfather’s encyclopedia for children (?) which was from about 1905. It mentioned flying machines but the illustration showed them landing on platforms atop skyscrapers. It was a thick 8-volume compendium of everything - history lessons, folk tales, projects (every few dozen pages, another paper cutout pattern to make a cute English village building by building), geography information… mostly UK-centric. I think I read those volumes completely but randomly, I’d pick one, open it at a random page, and there was always something new, rarely more than a page or two long for my limited attention span.

When I took a few years off college I worked a blue-collar job. I remember visiting a co-worker’s home. For reading material they had a few Golden Books and the Saturday newspaper (for the comics, mostly, I assume.) It would not surprise me if his 3 kids never became proficient readers.

36

That’s awesome. :sunglasses:
One day when my girl was about that age, she kept whining to me that she was bored. I sent her to her room with instructions to read the first ten pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone…and she was cured of boredom for life! She’s a librarian now.

37

I do hope he continues his interest in reading. That’s all I wanted to do as a kid. Teachers complained to my Mom about it. “She’s not socializing with other kids. Just sitting in the corner reading.”

“Is she enjoying herself?”

“Well, yes…”

“Then what’s the problem?”

I just don’t ever remember learning to read. It always seemed like something I could just do. So maybe I was that kid that learned through being constantly read to.

I still read all the time. I became a writer. I place bets my kid is more likely to be an engineer than a writer, but why not an engineer who reads? (I also know an engineer who writes, so anything’s possible.)

38

One thing I did as a kid was not just pretend to read out loud, but take the books my parents would read to me, and read them back. Sure, a lot of it was memorization, but I also learned to recognize some words.

But I didn’t really learn to read until kindergarten, using the Montessori method. It involved tracing the shapes of the letters and learning what sounds they make (with the vowels being “short” and the consonants on their defaults), then matching written words to pictures and/or objects, and finally little books that only used words that used those restricted sounds. The first set were pink and only used 3 letter words, while the next set were blue, and used 4 or more letters. Then there were modules for the alternative sounds, which were in the green section.

Obviously I’m not recommending you follow that method exactly, but I thought it might give you ideas. You could try having him Identifying the sounds of letters, tracing them, asking him what a short word is and helping him sound out the letters.

39

Rousseau, who was a dick inany ways, was right when he said that if a child has the desire to read, the method doesn’t really matter. Almosy anything you do will probably work, and you don’t need to find a particularly efficient method.

Just as a data point, I was rarely able to read to my son as a pre-schooler. He was Not Interested. I cannot tell you how distressing this was for my English teacher self. He just couldn’t sit still long enough to read, or even be read to. He wanted to play, and to make-believe. It didn’t even seem like he was even really following narratives in kids tv shows: he liked the the theme songs and action sequences, but never finished an episode of anything, and could not have summarized a story for anything. I felt like every other parent went on about how much their kid loved books, and mine just wanted to spend all day finding new parks and play places.

He was reading before Kinder, but barely, and it was only because he and his dad worked through a very cookie cutter phonics program. He was not much interested in words, but liked the process of working through lessons.

All that changed in 1st grade, when he started getting in mythology, and I read him Percy Jackson. Finally, he’d let me read to him without running off–but I had to stop and fully explain every detail before we could move on. After that, he read them himself and he never stopped. Now, he’s the reader of his 5th grade class: on school days, he reads 100-200 pages a day, and he can read anything that he has enough background to understand: he read Hunt for Red October and Jurassic Park last month, and was able to have real conversations about them.

It seemed to me it was like he needed a certain level of complexity of plot before it got interesting enough to hold his attention. He likes the meta a lot: at 4 or 5, his favorite thing was the scene in Spaceballs where the characters are watching the movie of themselves. He couldn’t get over how funny that was.

I guess what I am saying is that I agree with Dseid’s professional advice: they develop in different areas at different rates. Being behind in some areas at a certain age doesn’t always mean much, as they are just putting a lot of energy into other things. They can leap forward quite dramatically in areas where before you worried they were behind.

40

As a middle aged white lady, I’m so sorry that the tastes of middle age white ladies have become “literature” for entire generations. Even experienced high school teachers fall into the trap of “I read this book recently and it changed my life. Therefore, all my students must read it”. They don’t seem to recognize that a particular book changes your life because of everything you brought to it. Our real job is to give students the skills and habits they need to have their life changed by books, ideally on a regular basis.