CHAPTER 1.
BREAKING THE CODE
Teaching a child to read is really easy. It is basically teaching how to break a code. This is a simple straightforward task that can be taught when a child has the ability to see differences in words.
The task is to show him that a written word has meaning; just as he was taught between ages one and two that spoken words had meaning. He had to learn that the spoken word “mummy” applied to his mother, or “dog” to his pet.
He had to learn to recognize these words before he could reproduce them.
Establishing a link between the written word and meaning
The first stage of teaching reading is to establish this link between a written word and meaning. This is most easily done with the same sort of words that you used when he was leaning to speak - words in his own environment - names of family members, pets, animals and the like. As with teaching him to speak they need to be words he is really interested in - family members, animals - words he finds useful so he will remember them.
He needs to learn to look at different written words and see that they are different. For this you need to find words that have very different shapes, for instance although both “cat “ and “cow” are interesting words they are much less easy to differentiate in their written form than “cat” and “hippopotamus”. You might feel that “hippopotamus” is a much more difficult word, but this would only be the case if the word is unfamiliar to your child.
Once you have built up a number of words that are easily recognized which will be almost all be nouns, you may add some verbs - “jump”, “gallop”, or “swing”, “fish”- which can be nouns and verbs.
Put words in context in sentences
The next stage is to put these words into simple sentences.
The hard part about this is that there are words in almost all sentences that we do not notice are there. These are words like “the”, “has”, “with”, “this” and “is”. These words have to be taught in context with the nouns already established and then isolated so they can be used in a new context, “This is mummy.” “This is a hippopotamus.”, with illustrations to help.
Ability to independently work out new words
The third stage of learning to read is developing the ability to become independent of the teacher when needing to learn a new word. With young children the very strong “I can do it myself” syndrome is helpful here.
This is when phonics becomes a helpful tool. Phonics is using the sounds of letters to discover what the word is. Firstly it helps by giving a clue - Jack and Jemma both start with the same sound and letter. By the way, it is much more useful for a beginning reader to learn the sound that a letter makes rather than the name of the letter in the early stages. These sounds can then be joined together to make words.
But learning to associate a letter with a sound can be quite difficult, and firstly implies the ability to hear and differentiate sounds, at least those sounds at the beginnings of words. Then once you know what sound a letter generally makes it is still very difficult for a beginner reader to put these together and hear what the word is. I have heard countless children correctly identify and sound out the three sounds in “cat”, “c”, “a”, “t” and then say “dog” or some other quite dissimilar word. It is most frustrating to the teacher but putting the sounds that letters make together is a skill that takes practice.
But phonics is not the complete or immediate answer to learning to read English as also many words do not stick with the rules e.g. “P” for “Phillip”, or have complicated rules of combinations of sounds like “th” or “oo” or “ough.” The best way is for your child to learn to recognize quite a lot of words and then you introduce phonics, or sounding out words, to help him identify simple new words or differentiate partially known words.
Importance of a desire to read - motivation
But the most important aspect of learning to read in the long term is the desire to learn to read. In the very early stages this desire or motivation is gained almost completely from satisfaction gained by the ability to master a new skill (a very strong motivator in young children) and the praise of the adults around him for so doing.
The next stage is a desire to read a story for one’s self, and this is much more likely to occur if a child has already learned the joys to be gained from books.
The importance of motivation is often underestimated - it is most interesting to note that a whole generation of young people has learned what I find a very difficult encoding skill, that of being able to send text messages on their mobile phones (rapidly) because of the powerful effect of motivation. I don’t think that this is a writing skill taught at any school, but is universally achieved by the current generation of teenagers.
An easy task and fun
This all sounds quite simple, and it is, and you will be surprised how easy it is and how much fun. It is a new area of bonding between you and your child. The activities suggested provide fun games to do together, and you know how much enjoyment you already get reading together. It must not be serious, it is fun!