Beginning the Basics

I usually don’t blog about the everyday learning things we do.  It would be pretty boring to read that we sat around the playroom floor counting how many times we could jump or reading a lot of books everyday.  But in this one case, I’m making an exception because I have found a lot of interesting info on teaching the kids to read and I thought I’d share the wealth.

First of all, Briana has become very interested in reading since her 3^rd birthday.  She wants to know how to spell everything and she wants us to point out the words in the books we read her, and I want to help her out, of course.  I googled ‘teaching toddlers to read’ and the resultant volume of contrasting information made me want to continue on our slow, random path of learning letters.  But I diligently poured through the info anyway and stumbled upon a couple of homeschooling sites that say all of the “Your baby can read” style teaching methods are flawed because they force your baby to memorize thousands of abstract words and the child is basically making an educated guess based on the words you’ve shown them before.  They suggest (and I agree) that this is basically causing the kids to reinvent the wheel and intuit the laws of phonics.  They also said that it doesn’t make sense to teach a phonetic skill as if it were a pictographic skill.  This too made logical sense to me.  By the way, I know nothing about the “Your baby can read” program and have only heard good things about it, but the logic of the homeschooling sites makes sense to me.  The final argument that I liked was that phonics reinforces to kids that the world has some structure or order to it, which appeals to the toddler mindset.  I know Briana and Abigail love it when I break a task down into set steps for them to follow. 

I followed up with one of my kid’s teachers on parent-teacher night this week to get her thoughts on the “Your baby can read” style videos.  She completely agreed with the homeschooling sites that I found, and without my mentioning anything about what I had read, she said the exact same thing – that those videos just have the kids memorizing tons of new words and how they look and that the kids still can’t read new things as well as those taught using phonics.  So I decide to start trying to teach my kids the laws of phonetic spelling.  Hey, if that doesn’t work I can always buy the ‘Your baby can read’ videos anyway, right.

One site that I liked said to start teaching phonics you should start with the most common letters in this order:

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and then add letters as you come across them in reading.  In our world those don’t seem to be the most common letters, as you can’t write ‘mom’ or ‘briana’ though I do note that we could spell ‘dinosaur’ which is an important word at my house.  I do like the idea of focusing instead of trying to teach an alphabet worth of letters at once, so I decided to start with a different set based on spending a couple of days paying attention to what letters come up most often in the kids’ favorite books and activities and trying to get a mix of vowels and consonants so we could spell a word relatively quickly.  We start with the letters ‘badmit’…and no I’m not a huge badminton fan, it just happened that way.   For the record as I start to describe this, don’t be mistaken, I haven’t discovered something that is going to teach my kids to read this week, but we’re starting and here’s how it’s going…

Step 1- pick a letter to start with

We start with the letter B since Briana can recognize it pretty regularly already.

Step 2- use the 3-step Montessori process for teaching the letter’s sounds

First, I show the letter to the kids and say b makes the ‘ba’ sound.  Then I show the letter and have the kids make the ‘ba’ sound and call it a b.  We have a toy with a ridiculously catchy song “b says ba.  b says ba.  Every letter makes a sound and b says ba.” so I sing that a couple of times with the kids.  Finally we find ‘b’s all around (books, street signs, foods in the house, etc.) and I have the kids point out where the b’s are and say the sound for themselves.  Theoretically once they can answer “what’s this?” when they see a b and “what sound does b make” and find a b, call it a b, and say the sound for b by themselves, it is committed to memory.  Said another way, they need to be able to answer questions about the letter and the sound it makes no matter how you ask the question.

Step 3- add a new letter

Preferably add a vowel, if you started with a consonant, so that they can start making words sooner.   We added A for ah…ah…Abigail.

Step 4- give a reward

I do NOT mean to give the kids a toy for learning a letter.  I try to avoid those types of gifts for learning since I think it makes learning about getting something instead of the fun of learning for learning’s sake.  We all know (or are) people who only read books for a test or something but have missed out on the joys of curling up in the bathtub with a good book and a glass of wine…or maybe that’s just my dream afternoon.  Not to say I won’t give report card presents or something when the time comes, since I probably will, but the reward in this case is a personal satisfaction reward.  I showed the kids how the letters they learned, B-A-T in this case (over a week later by the way) have come together to make a word they know.  Briana was so excited that we postponed naptime for at least 30 to take her magnetic letters and make lots of words and sound them out.  Bree found it awe-inspiring to discover a real word and hilarious to sound out a word that ended up being “gibberish” or as Briana has started saying since I tried to explain Dora to her one day, “maybe it’s gibberish or maybe it’s Spanish”.  To put the words together, I found it helpful to have big plastic (and magnetic in our case) letters to use because I think it drives home the idea of sounding out the word better than if I’d just written the word on paper.

Step 5- repeat.

We worked on b for about a week before we added a.  Once Bree got a couple of letters down, she was pretty hungry for letters, so the repeat process went much faster because she knew what to expect from the letters and immediately tried to put new words together.  Incidentally, Bree just turned 3, so I think that’s she’s doing so well already, though realistically we’re probably still a year away from reading a book and even further from reading and understanding it after sounding out all of the words, though you never know, she might surprise me.  My advice is to make sure your expectations of your kids are realistic so that they can surprise you but don’t disappoint you.  I think our letter learning is really working because at parent-teacher night, her teacher said she was very much ahead of expectations as it related to knowing her letter sounds (and most other things too…sorry, can’t help but brag, I’m a mom J ), which means she’s finding and talking about letters even when my husband and I aren’t around doing the prompting.

Abby for her part is doing an unbelievable job repeating the sounds of the letters after I say them.   She’s also getting pretty close to having about half of the alphabet song down.  I think working on all of the sounds is expediting her vocabulary development too because she is getting the hang of new sounds.  As expected, her mastery isn’t happening as fast as Bree’s so she hasn’t gotten to put together words yet, but give her a break, she’s only 18 months old!! J  As Abby says if she repeats a letter sound well,  “Did it! Did it! Yeah!” Claps for Abby.

Some learning to read games we like:

The Hunt

One of the games that the teacher suggested was to find things in the room that begin with a letter.  The best thing about hunting for “ba..balls” and “ba…babies (dolls)” and “ba…bananas” etc. is that we can take the game with us wherever we go.  “Ma…McDonalds” and the big M was a huge find for Bree and I found myself sadly allowing us to drive to the M for dinner because I was so proud that Bree said “Mommy, I see an M.  M for Ma…ma…McDonalds just like M for Mommy!  I can read the McDonalds sign now Mommy.” with a hugely proud grin on her face (or maybe it was mischief because she knew she was conning me into a Happy Meal dinner, but I’m going with pride).

The Dreaded TV

I know that suggesting tv watching is completely taboo for toddlers, but oh well.  I think Sesame Street, Between the Lions, and Super Why are great for reinforcing the fun you can have reading.  My kids aren’t big on watching tv and lose interest after one episode in general, but when they’re tired and having a snack I totally put on those types of shows and let them see others using letters and having fun reading.  And just to be honest, we watch non-educational kids shows too and the kids learn things from those shows (and importantly, just relax and have fun sometimes too).  Everything in moderation…

Coloring

Simple things like cutting out letters or even just using an alphabet coloring book and having the kids color them, gives us a lot of time to talk about the letter and what sound it makes and what words start with that letter. 

And of course, books galore!

Have fun teaching your baby to read…phonetically!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife