Building Early Literacy Skills is not Rocket Science.

Every piece of advice I've ever seen about promoting early literacy in children can be summed up in three words: "Read, read, read!" That goes without saying.  In fact, nearly every baby shower gift I have given in the last twenty years has been accompanied by a copy of Pat the Bunny, or in a pinch, a board book.  Because you can read to babies, and I personally think you should.

However, some parents worry that they aren't doing enough. There are books and videos that promise to Teach Your Baby to Read.  Is that kind of targeted early instruction necessary?  I think not. Babies can learn to recognize sight words, to be sure, but that kind of reading limits the reader to only the words they have been taught.  Waiting until the child's brain is actually ready to use the "building blocks" of words-- the letters and combinations of letters-- is much more effective.  

But how, then, is a parent to make sure that a child is ready for the instruction when he goes to school?  Reading to babies, toddlers, and preschoolers definitely prepares them to enjoy and appreciate reading.  Babies learn that books contain words, that the words don't change, and the words may tell a story or share information. The books may even introduce letters and letter sounds, but the mystery of how those letters work is still something that most children will need to be taught later. So, beyond simply reading, what are some other things you can do with your baby or young child that will increase his chances of being a strong reader and writer in the future?

First, help your baby to communicate.  Through body language and sounds, we all send and receive information.  Every interaction you have with your child can increase her communication skills!  Use eye contact, smile, laugh; mimic her facial expressions.  Encourage her to mimic yours.  Many parents have found that teaching "baby signs" to their little ones not only reduces the frustration of terrible twos (when toddlers know what they want but lack the words to express themselves), but also builds brain connections that encourage verbal communication later on.  In fact, everything you do to facilitate communication with your child will build brain connections that will later be used in reading and writing. 

Talking to your baby will build his vocabulary.  A 2013 Stanford study found that babies who enjoyed the most verbal interaction with their parents had a significant advantage over less-talked-to peers. (1)  By age three the talked-to babies had heard an estimated thirty million more words, and understandably had a much larger vocabulary than the children of the less chatty parents. Of course the larger a child's vocabulary, the more words he can read and comprehend.  (And unlike words from the tv or computer audio, actual interaction with people promotes retention of the vocabulary-- simply put, the words mean more when they come from someone who loves you.)

As important as knowing what the words mean is learning to distinguish the individual sounds within the words.  I have mentioned in previous posts that word play is important to building the auditory processing skills that allow a child to read well.  Listening to (and later repeating) rhyming words in nursery rhymes, poems and songs, and alliteration in tongue-twisters, all help a child's brain sort sounds into meaningful units. He will learn to hear the differences between the sounds of cat vs bat, bat vs bit, and understand that the difference in a single sound can change one word to another word. This skill is critical to reading.

Besides sound discrimination, a little brain needs to develop visual discrimination in order to be able to tell the letters apart.  Shape-sorting, identifying pictures, and simply naming things he sees are all helpful activities.  Babies can "point to the dog" or "point to the cat." And babies are hard-wired to learn names for things.  It's not unusual for a toddler under the age of two to be able to identify the letters of the alphabet; this skill is no more difficult than identifying a simple drawing of a dog or a tiger. And while some educators prefer that children learn to associate a letter with its sound(s) before learning its name, I disagree.  Learning to distinguish a Q from an O, for example, is a lot easier if you can call each by its name rather than trying to explain "this round shape with a tail stands for the sound /k/ and this other one without a tail can sound like /oh/, /ah/, /uh/", etc.  So go ahead and read Dr Seuss' ABC, and sing the ABC song, to let your little guy learn his letters.  Just keep it fun!

Playing with three-dimensional letters can also help the child cement their forms in his mind. Letters can be formed out of play dough, or even cookie dough.  A simple alphabet puzzle allows the child to take the letters out and manipulate them, while still learning that they must be oriented in a certain way on the page (or puzzle board.)  This is an important skill as well; some experts in dyslexia say that the dyslexic brain's mental maneuvering of the letters can cause reading difficulty.  The letters on a page may seem to move around, orienting themselves in any direction.  According to the author of The Gift of Dyslexia, playing with 3-D versions of letters helps solidify the child's perception, so that the printed letters will stay still on the page. (2)  Kinesthetic learners are also helped by holding and moving the 3-D letters around.  They remember things they feel and move more than what they see, so giving their brain experience with "real" letters will help them transfer the knowledge to 2-D images of the letters-- aka "print"-- later on.

Fine motor skills and organization skills will also help build a foundation for good writing. That's why kindergarten used to include such activities as painting, sorting or stringing beads, and lacing cards, as well as coloring and drawing. Even babies can begin to work their fine motor skills by picking up Cheerios or other small finger foods and putting them in their mouths. Finger painting, swirling pudding around on a high chair tray-- these activities build the brain-muscle connections that will later make forming letters with a pencil much easier.  But of course writing is more than just a physical task; it also requires organizing thoughts into words and sentences.  The ground work for that can begin with babies, too.  Beyond the obvious "exercise" of having actual conversations at whatever level the little one is capable of,  organization can also be fostered through activities as simple as putting toys in a toy box and laundry in a hamper. Playing with a shape-sorting ball or ring stacker can further develop these skills.  (Although, to be honest, I've never seen a child actually use either of those toys for its intended purpose.)  In years to come, the child will be using those fine motor skills to form letters and words (or type them), and will be organizing his ideas into words.

Preparing your child for school success does not take extraordinary measures.  Especially in the early years, it's all about interacting with your child in positive ways: talking, playing, and reading with your little one will set the groundwork for future literacy instruction.  These are natural things that most parents do with their children anyway.  The little brain is absorbing language, sorting sounds and organizing things she sees.   And that's why, with effective instruction at the right time, most school-aged children can learn to read and write without a whole lot of trouble.  So relax!  Enjoy your baby and watch her grow.

1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710871/

2) http://davis-method.narod.ru/Gift_of_Dyslexia.pdf

Spelling starts with hearing. (And so does reading.)

If you've ever seen an English Bible translation made for deaf people, you may have initially wondered why it was written in such simple language.  Of course, it is not an indication of a lack of intelligence. It is because the written word is based on letters representing spoken sounds.  People who don't hear the language, then, must memorize the spelling of every single word they read. Unlike hearing people, they have no massive collection of speech "files"-- the sounds of the letters, the patterns of the words and sentences-- to draw from. Instead, the language areas of their brains are filled with the complex patterns and nuances of signs (at least for those who learn sign language-- not all do).  When a deaf person is learning to read print, then, each word has to be learned without the prior knowledge of what the word sounds like or how it is used.  So learning to spell and read English is at least as difficult for a deaf person as it is for an English speaker to learn to read Chinese.

I know there are people who insist that some children can only learn to read by sight, and that "phonics" will not work for them at all.   While that may be true,  in my experience those children would be extremely rare.  The increase in horrendous spelling habits I have seen in recent years has more to do, in my opinion, with the lack of a solid foundation, rather than an explosion in true dyslexia.  I suspect that many people who have attempted to teach a child to "sound out the letters" without success have begun before the child has developed adequate phonemic awareness and auditory processing skills-- that is, before the child can distinguish and identify separate sounds in words.  This is why many effective remedial reading programs, and dyslexia specialists, begin with identification of sounds.  (See Reading Reflex and Barton Reading and Spelling.)

Reading by sight-only can be done, as many literate deaf people can demonstrate, but it is unnecessarily difficult for people who have normal hearing.  It means you have to use a lot of visual memory just to comprehend what you are reading.  Yes, I've seen those memes that "prove" that people only read the first and last letters of words, but that is not true for a beginning reader, or anyone else seeing a particular word for the first time.  To fluently decode new words and to spell well, a child needs to be able to match the letters they see to the sounds they hear or have heard.

Phonemic awareness begins with hearing sound patterns.  This is why nursery rhymes and Dr Seuss books are so important for pre-reading.  Children hear the rhymes and begin to distinguish sounds and recognize sound patterns.   Although one might think that any child who can speak can also recognize sounds, there is another level of connection that needs to be made before a child can begin to read phonetically.  Some children make this connection naturally, while others may need a bit of help.

The colored golf shown balls above can be used to increase a child's phonemic awareness in a fun way.  Each ball represents a separate sound. (Note that a sound such as /ay/ can be represented by different letters-- a, ae, ay, eigh-- but is still a single sound.)  "/Ay/" could be represented by the blue ball.  "Ape" has two sounds, /ay/ and /p/, so would be represented by two balls.  "Tape" has three sounds:  /t/, /ay/, and /p/, so three balls would be used.  "Tapes" would use four balls, to represent the  four sounds /t/, /ay/, /p/, and /s/.

To play the sound balls game, you would start by saying a one- or two-sound word and having the child identify the sounds and place a ball down for each sound heard.  Words such as a, pay, say, day, I, pie, lie, my, oh, dough, no, sew, and toe are examples.  When the child has mastered identifying the separate sounds, ask him what would happen if you replaced one sound with another--  take the /p/ out of pie and use replace it with /b/.  (buy)  Take the /i/ out of pie and replace it with /ay/.  (pay) Have the child physically take the ball out of the correct position and replace it with a different colored ball.

This activity should be done in short sessions.  It is better to do it a few minutes a day, every day, rather than an hour or two once a week.

Three-sound words are the next step.  Have the child identify the separate sounds in words like cat, sit, top, live, ham, .  Words with vowels in the middle are easiest, but you will eventually want to work on words with consonant sounds back-to-back such as try, ask, blue.

Next, try four-sound words: seeds, sled, trip, lights, chimp.  Start with a single ball for a single sound, sound and add one ball/sound at a time:  I /i/  Put /p/ in front:  pie.  Put /s/ at end:  pies.  Put /r/ between p and i: prize.  The middle sounds are more difficult, so you may need to keep working on first and last sounds for a while.

While you're working on the sounds, don't feel obligated to stick to real words.  You can also use nonsense words like gat, glat, frub.  The important thing at this point is the sound discrimination.

Please bear in mind that the more sounds there are, the more memory is required to process them.  Some children may stall out at 3-sound words.  That's fine; try a four-sound word every once in a while but don't push to the point of frustration.

Once your child is comfortable using the colored objects to represent the letters, you can begin to introduce the letters.  This is where Scrabble tiles, alphabet puzzle letters, or other manipulatives are used.  (Paper, felt or craft foam squares with letters written on them work fine.) Four at a time is probably sufficient, and it is probably best to start with sounds that are represented by single letters.  For example, the letters s, t, o and p can be used to form op, top, stop, pot, and pots.  ("Post" has a different sound in the middle, so don't use that one.  If it happens to show up, you can simply explain to your child that letters can stand for more than one sound.)  Later on you will need tiles with letter combinations that represent a single sound, such as ch, ck, wh, th, sh, ll, ue, ew, ay, etc.  Please note that consonant blends (dr, br, sl, tr)  are still made up of separate sounds, so they do not get their own tiles.

So that's how you use manipulatives to increase phonemic awareness and begin to build a great foundation for reading and spelling.

For a complete list of phonograms and the phonemes they represent, jump to this post, available Tuesday 6/16.