Here are eight ways you can become a better reading teacher.
One. Evaluate four- and five-year-olds to see if they are ready to learn to read. If a student is not ready, delay.
Two. Teach your beginning readers to encode more and to decode less. Offer daily time to orally create words from sounds that the students already know. Show a picture of a pig. Ask students to sound out pig, not using letters, but using the sounds in the word.
Three. Start with words whose sounds have a one-to-one correspondence to consonant and short vowel letter sounds—no digraphs, no silent letters, no exceptions to the rules.
Four. Refer to letters by their sounds for beginning readers. Explain that letters are pictures of sounds, and that it is the sounds which are important for reading.
Five. Teach children to pay attention to their lips and mouths when they sound out words. Each time their mouth opens or closes, or their lips change shape, their mouth is saying a different sound. When we join together the sounds, we form words.When you introduce the ABC’s, start with a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds of English and a letter or letter pair. This is easy if a consonant makes only one sound, such as “b.” But when a sound can be represented multiple ways (for example, “oi” and “oy”) pick one “default” way for starts and stick to it. Avoid words which are not spelled with the default letters. You might teach boy, toy and coy, but for now avoid teaching boil, toil, and coil. On the other hand, if a child writes, “Mom spoyls me,” ignore the misspelling. But when children repeatedly write a word wrong (“wuz,” for example), tell them the correct spelling so the phonetic spelling does not become embedded in their brains.
Six. Don’t teach concepts such as digraphs, blends, and diphthongs to beginning readers. Teach sounds. If there are fancy academic words to call these sounds, don’t use them. You will only confuse beginning readers.
Seven. Don’t become a speller for your students. Once they are writing and using ABC’s, write difficult words on the board. Otherwise, tell students to sound words out. Also don’t mark misspelled words wrong.
Eight. When you introduce ABC’s, use typefaces which show the versions of letters which children will use when they handwrite. For example, use this type of “a” and “g.” Also, typefaces which slightly enlarge half-space letters like “a,” “c” and “e” are easier for kids to read. (The typeface you are reading is such a typeface.)
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I suggest you give your child a pretest to see what reading skills your child has learned well, and what ones he has not yet grasped.
The words on this pretest are more or less divided into four kinds of words in this order:
1. Short (closed) vowel, one-syllable words. These include one- and two-letter words, words beginning or ending with blends and digraphs (black, church) words which end in twin consonants (fell, jazz), words which end in “ck,” and words to which an “s” can be added to make plural words or certain verbs (maps, runs).
2. Long (open) vowel, one-syllable words. These include words ending with silent “e,” words with double vowels which have only one vowel pronounced (goes, pear), and certain letter combinations (ild, old). They also include words with “oi,” “oy,” “ow” and “ou” letters.
3. Two– and three-syllable words which follow the above rules (catnip, deplete) and two- and three-syllable words which don’t follow the above rules but which follow a pattern (light, yield). These words include words with certain suffixes (le, ies) and words with a single consonant between two vowels (robin, motel).
4. Exceptions. These include words with silent letters (gnaw, lamb), words from other languages (debris, cello), and words which fit no pattern (business).
Ask your child to read the words in the pretest below. Each row across tests a particular phonics skill. If you child hesitates at all, that is the place to begin teaching him or her phonics. I will talk more about how to teach these four groups of phonics skills in my next blog.
Phonics assessment
bad, hem, fit, don, pug, am, if, lass, jazz
lock, Mick, bills, cliffs, mitts, catnip, Batman
grand, stent, frisk, stomp, stuck
chuck, shun, them, branch, brush, tenth
star, fern, birds, fork, purr, actor, doctor, victor
muffin, kitten, collect, pepper, gallon
complex, helmet, falcon, napkin, after
tantrum, muskrat, constant, fulcrum, ostrich
skate, bike, Jude, mole, dare, shore, tire, pure
need, cheer, aim, hair, bay, pie, boat, oar, Joe, low, soul
fruit, few, child, blind, fold, colt, roll, light, high
earn, worm, rook, pool
fault, claw, all, chalk, Walt
boil, so, pound, down
comet, dragon, liver, salad, denim
total, ever, student, basic, demon, vital
apron, elude, Ethan, Owen, ideal, usurp
inside, nearly, absent, unicorn, degrade, tripod
advance, offense, fence
gripped, planned, melted, batted, handed
sweeping, boiling, thinning, flopping, biking, dating
rapper, saddest, finer, bluest, funnier, silliest
easily, busily, massive, active, arrive, wives
keys, monkeys, armies, carried
action, section, musician, racial, crucial, nuptials
brittle, pickle, carbon, dormer
parcel, decent, gem, urge, badge
lose, sugar, nature, sure
graph, Phil, then, moth
bomb, thumb, gnat, gnome, high, sign
whip, whirl, echo, ghoul, knee, knob
could, calf, folk, hustle, listen, wrist
alone, bread, bear, chief, young, squaw, swan, waltz, word
decision, exposure, gigantic, polarize, occupant, quarantine
If you want to help your child learn to read, one of the best things you can do is not to let him guess. Most words can be deciphered if the student has a phonics background.
Also, don’t let your child depend on pictures for meaning once the child starts to read. Most adult reading material is not accompanied by graphics. Students must learn to gain meaning from the text alone.
If you have decided to help your child read this summer, good for you. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to help your child read better. Years of research show that the best way to teach reading is to start with letter sounds (phonemes) and then to combine those letter sounds into words (phonics). If you do this in a systematic way, such as following the four-part sequence I describe above, your child will learn to read.
When children learn to read using a phonics method, they start by learning that each sound has a one-to-one relationship with a letter. This makes reading seem logical to little children. See a B and say “b.” As teachers we don’t muddy beginning readers’ thinking by telling new readers that some letters mean more than one sound or that some letters, when paired with other letters, make totally different sounds or that some sounds can be represented by multiple groupings of letters. We save that for later, after children have “mastered” the concept of CVC words and blends.
comicphonics for early readers 