CHAPTER 2. WHY BOTHER
Is there any value for your child?
Why bother with all this when your child is going to be taught perfectly well at school without any bother to you? Maybe it is harmful.
In my case I taught my daughters to read because they were looking for something to do and it was fun. How could I keep Lindy happy or probably more accurately - out of mischief - while I was breast feeding her younger sister, which used to take about an hour several times a day.
With Lizzie, who had a habit of not wanting to try anything until she knew she could do it well. She did not talk till she was two (her first recorded words were when she demanded “Two bickies”! ). She did not suffer any ill effects from speaking late, but I was concerned that she might decide not to take on reading at school until she was assured that she could do it. She was very happy to learn a new word every day so long as she could decide which one it was.
Learning to read quickly is valuable
I believe if can be very valuable to get the early stages of learning to read over as fast as possible and have a valuable effect on later attitudes to reading.
No one can really pretend that the early stages of reading are much fun - slowly puzzling out a sentence word by word so that you forget the beginning by the time you get to the end. The stories have to be so simple that they are not much fun for the parent: “Hop Dick hop”. The main motivating factor is the feeling of achievement, which is magnified by the parent or teacher expressing pleasure and astonishment at their ‘brilliance’.
It is also true that children do get a lot of satisfaction from learning any skill - even if it is frustrating. Have you ever watched a child teaching itself to skip with a skipping rope, learning to bounce a ball or some other desired skill? We see the enormous amount of energy and concentration that a child can apply to something that interests him.
Have you taught yourself to ski? Or to play golf? After twenty years I still keep thinking that if I try harder and practice more my cross-country skiing will improve.
In our schools children frequently spend two or more years struggling through the early stage of reading, and understandably often develop a great dislike for the process, as well as lacking any feeling of achievement. But in my experience all those children who “crack the code” in the first six months and learn to read quite efficiently, well enough to get some enjoyment from the experience in six or nine months, are the ones who develop a love of reading. They get a real feeling of achievement, it is good for their self-image and they want to read more. As they read more they reinforce their phonics and vocabulary skills and become good at reading. When they learn at home they can learn in even less time.
They then find learning easy in all subjects and the whole process becomes self-reinforcing. Therefore I believe that if some concentrated help at the vital early stage achieves this for a child, it is probably the most valuable single thing a parent can do to advance his or her child’s education.
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.
Save private school fees!
I put it to you that spending the time and money on this program at this stage of your life -probably when you are the most busy - and could do without the extra work - could do more to save you coaching fees, private school fees- a really keen student does not need an expensive school - and also countless hours of heartache if you child “turns off” from learning.
Being in the top half of the class
It is currently a fashion to keep your child back from starting school till the next year if he is in the younger half of the year. This is supposed to be so he will not be too immature to learn to read. Firstly, in my opinion this is bunkum, as most children have all the facilities needed to learn to read by about four and a half, and six year old boys who have not been very keen to sit down and concentrate at five, tend to be even more keen to play rough games with their mates and less keen on academic pursuits at age six. In my experience the younger children are much more naive, and ready to do everything a teacher suggests and easier to motivate to learn to read than older ones. But rather than this being the main motivating force in keeping a child back. I know many parents do this because want their child to be in the top of the group and believe this will give him an edge over his mates. It may mean he will always be picked for the football team, but I am not sure it will always help his early learning.
But you can ensure he is in the top group learning wise if you give him an extra good start; before he goes to school, or, as the parents in my research study did, parallel to his first year.
Can’t I just read my child stories and help out as a reading mother?
Isn’t it just enough to read a story every night, hear them reading at home when they start school, buy educational toys and watch educational TV programs?
RESULTS OF MY RESEARCH
I was vitally interested in this question when my children were young and when I had the opportunity to do a research study for a master’s degree; I tried to find the answer.
I compared the reading achievement of the children of keen, motivated parents who wanted to help their children to read but did not know how to do so, with the achievement of children of similar parents who carried out the program set out in this book over a three months period.
I found that the children in the research group made spectacularly greater gains in learning to read than those in a matched control group over the three months period.
The parents also enjoyed the experience and this was followed by many other groups of parents who used the program in subsequent years.
When I started my research I thought that keenly motivated parents doing all the things that good parents do would probably be all that was needed to make a difference. But my results showed clearly that although these things may have beneficial effect it did not have any real effect on learning to read quickly and efficiently, but it was the use of this program made the really great difference. All the parents in both the experimental and control groups were really keen enthusiastic parents and most had much more time available than you probably have, but having some appropriate knowledge about how to teach reading was what made the real difference.
How improvement was achieved in the study
The study looked at the achievement of both children from privileged homes and children from disadvantaged homes using the program. I expected that the children with parents from the privileged background would, as found in many other studies, provide a more helpful and stimulating background for school learning. And it was true that these children all had higher results. But there was no significant difference in the improvement between the two groups. Both improved equivalently although the high socioeconomic status group started from a higher level.
Another interesting test was a comparison of the children of parents who volunteered (excluding the experimental group) compared with the children of non-volunteers. To my surprise no difference was found.
Reason for this book
This book was written to give any parent who would like to help their child to read earlier or faster the tools to do so easily and having lots of fun. It is based on a program that was shown to work in a research study, and comes with a guarantee that it also has worked with thousands of parents and children.
In the research study it was used with children who had just started school - and it is most suitable to supplement what is being taught at school. Starting with the preliminary sessions it has also been successfully used for children starting to read from scratch before they start school.
This book basically provides a simple course in the teaching of beginning reading with simple, practical, interesting, child-based activities to carry out, set out as lesson plans to help parents.
I don’t want to be a ”pushy“ mother
You may feel that you do not want to be part of the current over-competitive push to have your child the best, and you will leave your child to cope in the school system provided.
It is interesting to observe that, even thirty years ago the interest shown by such very high proportions of parents volunteering for the program then, would suggest that if you are not interested your are quite unusual. And this was not just parents in the leafy suburbs, but right across the spectrum.
You may feel you need to take some control of your child’s learning
The control of your child’s learning is now in the hands of your child’s teacher. They may be good, bad or indifferent. They may interact exceptionally well with your child or clash.
If your child is a potential high achiever
Your child’s teacher is not likely to be keen to push a high achiever beyond the bounds of the average. She is kind and egalitarian. She is much more likely to be keen to see that all children reach a good basic level. High achievers can cope by themselves. Many teachers were not themselves high achievers and are not particularly sympathetic to high achiever needs.
You as a parent have to fill the gap!
Is your average child reaching his full potential?
The answer is probably not. And unless you have some knowledge about what learning is occurring, and what could be occurring, you cannot know or do anything about it. This program can help you to get involved with your own child’s learning!
Your child’s teacher gets better results than you can do.
This is because they have all sorts of simple tricks of the trade. Use this program to develop some of these yourself.
And if you must teach your child at home?
Many parents prefer to home-school their children. But they will be much more successful teachers of reading if they understand the processes involved in learning to read.
And these days of corono virus, many parents may be required to teach their children at home. Parents may be given help, but will not be equipped with a real understanding of what they are doing at the early and incredibly important stages of beginning reading.
This book basically provides a simple course in the teaching of beginning reading with simple, practical, interesting, child-based activities to carry this out set out as lesson plans to help parents.