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

Factual Questions
61

Yes, and the ‘a’ is pronounced differently in ‘car’ to ‘cat’ (I think in all accents?!)

Car: ɑː or ɑ

Cat: ă or æ

To help children read, we start with one letter to one sound correspondence … and in their second year of schooling (once they have mastered the initial code) then introduce the next stages where one letter can be two different sounds and two letters can be one sound.

It’s quite amazing breaking down the English language to understand the links between speech sounds and print.

Helping children develop phonemic awareness (differentiating sounds in words) is really important and can help identify areas of speech that need improvement … f / th confusions etc. Heggerty Phonemic Awareness has an online program for Kindergarten level that is also helpful … but less parent friendly! Rhyming words, sounding out words, and swapping sounds in words are all part of children learning to break up the language into parts that will eventually be read / written.

62

Different in all AFAIK, although the exact vowels vary. Vowels are tricky. My mostly phonics-based (but the 80s version) Kindergarten oversimplified to 10 long/short a e i o u, with “long I”, /aɪ/, presented as the vowel in both “hi” and “kite”. But my accent raises /aɪ/ before voiceless consonants, so those words don’t have the same vowel. The convention seems to be to write the raised one as ⟨ʌɪ⟩, although the exact quality varies. Confused the heck out of a bunch of five-year-olds.

63

Do they also get to read something that they want to read?

64

Nah, we take away all the books and force them to just read the ones we like …. Of course they are given free access to whatever books they would like … but you would be surprised how many children “like” the books they are actually able to read. It gives them such a boost to NOT make things up, to actually read words … and they then share them with others.

I do like children’s books that are written for children to read … it seems so counterintuitive that most children’s picture books are unreadable by the children they’re are aimed at. And yes, of course parents reading to children is important!

65

I give this book to any child I can. So far, every kid I’ve read it to turns right around and “reads” it back to me.

66

Only a slight exaggeration of my second-grade teacher’s attitude, which was that we were all supposed to be reading Dick and Jane and anything else was too hard for us and we most certainly weren’t supposed to be reading it.

That was quite a few years ago, and I hope her ilk are gone; and am certainly glad that you’re not among them.

67

A slightly different perspective: I’m the “gifted” (shudder) teacher for my K-5 school, and among other jobs, I often hold reading groups for kids who are above grade standard in reading. Our school used to use the guided reading/balanced literacy approach, and we had dozens upon dozens of sets of books at various levels. But when we switched away from guided reading, our school got rid of almost all these book sets.

I’ve used classroom funds to buy sets of novels that I can use for my studies: Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, One Crazy Summer, The Giver, Dragon Pearl, and more. But when it comes to younger grades, I don’t have those authentic books. The only book sets we have are phonics decodables.

So when I’m working with second graders, I’m working with kids who are reading at a fourth or fifth grade level. But the books I have to work with them are second-grade decodables, because of our district’s pivot to a phonics approach.

My compromise is that we spend one lesson reading the book and working on spelling patterns, and one week doing internet research on the questions they have, spurred by the content (Why do squirrels have more than one nest? How do butterflies fly? Why are cranberries red?) We focus in the first lessons mostly on metacognitive skills like noticing and wondering, and in the second lesson on research and notetaking; but it’s only in the second lesson that we read texts that these second graders actually find challenging.

It’s okay, but we’d be better off if we still had those leveled sets–not because of the level codes on the books, but because I could give these students more reading that is at the edge of what they can comprehend.

68

We are doing a little more on phonics. He gets the concept, I think, but he always wants to jump the gun as soon as he sees the first letter and not sound out the other letters. It’s challenging to get him to slow down and sound it out. He has a fantastic memory, so I’m afraid he’s just committing all of these words to memory.

Obviously it’s not an emergency that he learn to read now. We’re going over this stuff just a few minutes a day, and we’ll see how it goes.

I also wonder if it’s true that he’s not picking up a lot of meaning from the words we read to him, it might make it more difficult for him to learn to read. We might reach him better through fact-based books like the Dr. Seuss Encyclopedia books. We have one on whales, and the ocean, and the planets. He likes the pictures in story books, but I don’t think he is getting the story part.

69

Oh that’s dreadful they take away other books! Whilst I don’t like the levelled texts as “learn to read” they provide a great range of pictures across interests! Most of the schools I’ve taught in that have brought in decodable books get children to read books they can decode PLUS access to full library and classroom library that have “normal” children’s books.

In my classroom (equivalent to USA kindergarten), each child has a book box which contains one decodable (teacher selected), one library book (child choice), one non-fiction (child choice) … then during reading time they can choose extra decodables or “normal” books.

70

Well, wait–I didn’t say they got rid of all books. I said that they got rid of most book sets. Book sets are useful for small groups, when you want a shared text, not for independent reading. We have a fine library for independent reading, but the book sets are all heavily phonics-based and aren’t great for kids who don’t need as heavy a phonics dose.

71

Please remember or recognize that the OP is not asking about the teaching of 5 to 7 year olds in a classroom setting as a statistical group entity. I will of course defer to the expert consensus of teachers here on the relative efficacy of a primarily or even exclusively phonics method is to that age group in that setting, which I suspect is the population studies that you state provides clear evidence.

The OP is instead asking about a specific child who is under three years old, whose parent has concerns regarding possible autistic spectrum, who seems to be showing interest in books, when he is not obsessing over numbers, and for the short periods of time he pay attention.

Sharing resources is wonderful! Sharing what the current consensus on the evidence is for teaching methods for reading in Kindergarten and First Grade, is informative.

Putting on my critical analysis hat however I’d be cautious about stating that therefore that method is the singular best method for every child, especially for a very specific child likely not of the age range well represented in the studies that you’d cite, and possibly with some specific differences from the general population.

Do you have anything to cite specific to children learning to read before and around age three? Do you have anything to share regarding the OP’s wondering that IF he is ASD how that might impact the most appropriate method to use, perhaps beyond merely learning the mechanics of reading, to possibly more broadly?

I’m no expert on pedagogy but I do suspect there are differences in both instances, and that what works best for typical children learning at typical ages may not automatically be what is best to use at for a specific child under three with possible neurodivergence.

72

A question for those of you with the pin/pen merger. If you were taught phonics, how did your teacher present the short ‘e’ and ‘i’ sounds? Were they the same?

I had a strong Boston accent (khakis = car keys) growing up, so I should be the last person to talk, but the pin/pen and Mary/marry/merry mergers blow my mind. To me, they are so distinct.

73

actually, no one knows how I learned to read according to half the town I lived in I was in a store when I was between 2 and 3 and I picked up a book about cats back when grocery stores had book sections it was “your first kitten”( which I and mom picked out a week or two before and we were waiting for mom cat to give it up) and began walking around the store reading out of the book to anyone I knew excited by the forthcoming kitten … Which led to me being invited to go to a preschool mom couldn’t afford the year
I went there was one of the few times I enjoyed going to school…

74

The basic skills for reading are, broadly, decoding and comprehension.

Decoding means recognising the letters and knowing the sounds they make, and also understanding how to split words up into individual sounds (phonemic awareness). Then combining these skills to be able to sound out words. It also involves knowing print conventions, like that print runs left to right, how pages turn, the connection between how print is laid out and what it refers to (e.g. the label on a picture), punctuation, etc.

It sounds like he knows alphabet already. You can promote phonemic awareness through songs, poems, rhyming games, alliteration, spoonerisms, as well as sounding out words. Understanding conventions comes through exposure, but you can also point them out specifically. That can also be things like signs and logos.

The other aspect is comprehension, which involves many different things, like vocabulary, grammar, world knowledge, social knowledge, theory of mind, working memory, inferences and implications, etc. Oral language comprehension involves a lot of the same skills, and oral language ability is a predictor of reading success.

With decoding, once they know how, they know how, pretty much. I think this is what people think of when they talk about ‘teaching someone to read’. Most people learn decoding just fine (Possibly relevant, the stereotypical profile for children with ASD is that their decoding is much better than their comprehension). Reading comprehension is more of a life-long journey. The way you talk about your son, I think that maybe you are more concerned about comprehension than decoding, so just know that teaching one doesn’t teach the other.

Just to throw this out there, the fact that he looks at books a lot doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to learn to read. It could be pretend play, where he is imagining himself as a reader. Or he might like the way books look or smell.

Also, to confess my biases. I’m a preschool teacher in Australia. I don’t teach children to read, but Australian schools all teach phonics, from kindergarten, with a few hundred sight words like ‘the’ and ‘most’ thrown in. If there are other ways to teach reading, I don’t know about them. The evidence for phonics is really solid.

75

As someone who reads a lot more than he talks, I can tell you that this will never go away. Not the most recent example, but a while ago I was talking to an Irish woman who was drinking a herbal tea and called it a Tiss-a-nEE. My brain froze, and then I asked her to spell it. Tisane. I’d encountered the word in print a couple of decades beforehand and read it as Tis-SAne. I just hope that whenever I’m saying words incorrectly, people think I’m eccentric rather than stupid.

76

My mum used what she called “flash cards” - simple words printed on cardboard that could be arranged and constructed into a sentence - very much like those fridge magnet words, but obviously aimed at the younger end of the scale.

I came home from my first day in primary school crying, because I was jealous of my older brother, and I didn’t learn to read on day one. My mum (she is a senior school teacher, but teachers like to teach) taught me to read after that, so I was well ahead of my class.

I think the best way to teach kids is human interaction. My mum spent about an hour a day on reading with me, and the combination of bonding and learning is a really powerful one.

Of course it got to the point where I was SO far ahead of the required homework reading a few years later, that I had no need to read the books, but I did have to falsify my mum’s signature on the card we got to certify we had read 10 pages of “Janet and John” or whatever. The start of my criminal career.

77

I wonder if you could make up a nonsense word game? Choose some letters in a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern and make up a new word, and then create a definition for the word and start using it. Z-U-P can mean “jump up and down as fast as you can” or “stick out your bottom” or “the sound of a plastic bag being opened” or whatever.

I can imagine kids who find it alarming to create new words and don’t want to do it, and in that case it won’t be a good game; but other kids might find it hilarious, and it could be an engaging way to practice letter sounds.

78

Is this an Australian thing where you drop the R in car? CAT and CAR are both single sounds to me but each composed of three sound blocks. Kids will need to learn that the A sound is pronounced differently, but for everyday words, I think that’s something they pick up quite quickly.

79

Nope–it’s definitely American English.
https://tfcs.baruch.cuny.edu/r-controlled-vowels/

80

Yes, and I apologize for not putting that up front in the OP - it’s certainly relevant information. I’m only beginning to process all this.