So what does it mean to teach a three, four or five year old child how to read?
The first job of any reading teacher is to start at the beginning...a three year old child may not know that there are such things as letters or care.
You have to make "lettering" fun. So for a long time at the Garden School, we've developed very very short stories about each letter that really lets a young child wonder, think, laugh and enjoy that little squiggle on the page. Turn an A on it's side and you have an Airplane! a B looks like a Butterfly! Mr. C Clam lives under the sea...and so go the stories.
Many parents say, "My son knows all his letters."
And I always ask, "So if I show him a lower case q, he's going to know what it is?"
"Oh, no, I don't think so. But he can sing his Alphabet Song!"
Singing the Alphabet Song and recognizing all the letters are about as far from one another as having a dog and having a picture of a dog.
Getting three year olds to recognize letters is really far easier than most people imagine. Children are not visual learners...they are auditory learners becoming visual learners, so repeating something about four times usually teaches a child whatever you're trying to teach him. If you tell him about what he is seeing...it's a bingo right away. So when you turn that A on it's side...few children won't remember. It probably takes a month to teach eager children the alphabet letters and another month to teach the sounds.
The big sellers of "age appropriate" nonsense always cringe when I talk about three year olds learning letters and making phonemes for fun. It's as if I ran over their dignity with a truck. The truth is that three year olds WANT to know, so why not teach them? If they don't remember; they're not ready. If they don't pay attention; their minds are still with the angels, so try again next month.
Interestingly enough, children who are potty trained at a decent age - 18-26 months - are actually more eager to learn letters than children who are left in infancy through the third and fourth year. And it makes sense when you think about it. Children who become independent, and there are three big childhood independences: potty training, reading and driving a car, are keen to forge out on their own little life paths more readily than the child whose independence is repressed in a diaper.
By age four, most of our students have learned all their upper and lower case letters and know what sounds, or phonemes, these letters make, and they are putting sounds together to make words. This is the bridge to reading.
By five, our kids are reading and finding their own books and exploring new words and how sentences are structured. It's fun to make up a story, and by five, the cognition is ripe for invention, story telling, story inventing...it's called creative writing.
Teaching reading is a matter of consistency, repetition, and doing. New games and new activities stimulate the child towards bigger and wider goals. That's why I hate text books. Text books are a school aged diaper. They are repression in a stack of paper... I mean have you ever read a text book that is interesting? It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to come up with thirty minutes worth of reading work for a three, four or five year old child. It takes a sense of this then that then this then that kind of mind set.
I've written several little texts for kids using our own choice of words and kids eat them up. They are very time consuming to produce, but the product is fun and rewarding only because they are personalized and aimed at OUR children's lives.
And practice always makes perfect. Children need to practice something in their own space and time. It doesn't have to be a huge copy assignment or even take very long. Homework for a very young child should be more of an independent study...what can I do all by myself...so that I can proudly show my OWN work to my mom or dad.
I like to send a new book home every day so that their little homework bag is inviting and calls them to WANT to open it at home. Once they see the book and look at it even for a minute, might make them take out their little sentence building words long enough to play a "how can I make this sentence longer and longer" game. That might make them want to write down what they built with the word cards. Then they might want to illustrate the picture.
Reading is a process, and families who turn of the TV in order that a nice little period of work-study can be achieved at home are blessed and will encourage early readers to read all their lives. Children will not read into adulthood if adults in the home never pick up a book. So find a little space with a little space and do a quiet independent study...only has to take about fifteen minutes.
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