What's in a name? A great place to start reading!

You have Dr Seuss' ABC memorized.  You can recite The Cat in the Hat in your sleep.  If you read Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever out loud one more time, you're going to sprout goose feathers yourself.   But is your child ready to start actually reading?

(And by "reading," I refer to a child being able to decode not only the words he is familiar with, but also words he has never before seen in print that follow similar patterns.)

So---is he ready?  Maybe.  As long as you're not in a hurry. If you take it slow and provide plenty of hands-on practice, your child can probably begin to read, even before kindergarten.  But this is assuming his cognitive development is at the right spot.  Because after establishing good phonemic awareness, the next requirement to learning to read is being able to hang on to small pieces of information long enough to process them together.  For example, to read the word "dog," a child must not only know the sound represented by the letters, but also be able to string them together to form a word. A word like "documentary" takes a lot more memory to process.  And in order to comprehend whole sentences, the reader must remember the beginning words by the time she gets to the ones at the end.

Granted, there are folks who insist that you can Teach Your Baby to Read , but that is only possible by sight words, which trains the brain to "read" in very impractical way-- a whole word at a time, with no breakdown of the component sound parts.  A great explanation of the general outcome is explained in this dad's blog.  It's what I have seen most often in my students-- guessing at words, misreading one word for another ("diffidence" for "difference"), poor spelling, and a complete inability to break down unfamiliar words into syllables in order to read them.

In general, the older a child is, the longer sequence of information he can store in his memory, in order to make sense of it.  That's why you give a three-year old short instructions: "Come here, Joe."  "Stop hitting."  An older child can usually process more information, so that you can tell a ten-year old, "Take the hamper to your room and fill it with your dirty clothes."

It's the same with reading.  The younger the child, the fewer pieces of data he's going to be able to hold in his short-term memory long enough to make sense of it all.  Whether you're talking sounding out a word or comprehending a sentence, age tends to give the advantage.  That's why older children tend to pick up reading more quickly.  In fact,  research has shown that by the time students are in third grade, there's no noticeable difference between the reading ability of kids who started to read early vs kids who started "late," as long as they have developed phonemic awareness skills.

(Which drives me up the wall because schools insist on forcing *all* kindergarteners to read these days, or they can't pass on to first grade.  Forty years ago hardly anyone even began reading instruction until first grade, and then it was heavy on phonemic awareness.  Today some kids are so rushed, all they have time for-- and the cognitive ability for-- in kindergarten is memorizing the Dolch Sight Word list.  Then they just keep piling on sight words in the next grades and never get the full benefit of learning the phonograms. Are the kids now smarter by third grade, reading better, achieving more?  Um, no. Hopping off soapbox now.)

But let's say your child has excellent phonemic awareness.  She is already really good at making rhymes, and can distinguish the different sounds in a 3- or 4-letter word.  Maybe she even knows the names of the alphabet letters and some of their sounds.  What now?

The most important word to your child is her own name.  So why not use it to start teaching her to read and write?

Maybe your child can already write his name.  If not, even a toddler can learn to at least recognize his own name.  And if you make learning it a hands-on activity, it can be a lot of fun.  As mentioned in previous posts, using some type of moveable letters is the key. Starting off with 3-D letters, such as wooden or foam alphabet puzzles, is my recommendation.   (Using a puzzle with all capital letters is probably the easiest to begin with, although you might need two.  I have a puzzle with upper and lower case letters, so that is what I show here.)

Later on, letter tiles make a good transition from 3-D letters to 2-D print.   Some kids who have no trouble recognizing a stick-figure person or a simple line-drawing of a house will get all confused when presented with letters in print.  Why is that?  I suspect it is because they already know what the stick person or line drawing represents, because they understand what a person and a house are.  If the child has had real-life experience with the 3-D letters, then seeing and distinguishing the letters in print later may be much easier.

So if I were starting from square one to teach a child to read,  I would start by showing him his name in 3-D letters.  Even if the child's name is "Poindexter,"  he needs to see what his own name looks like.  If the child's name is Bob or Anna, so much the better!

(By the way:  if your son or daughter is at the age where s/he insists on being called "Batman" or "Elsa," feel free to go with that name.  One of my brothers used to sign his name "Lowly Worm.")

So I take the 3-D letters and place them in order on the table or floor.  I tell him that when we read, we use pictures of the sounds.  These sound pictures are called letters.  Sometimes a sound picture is one letter, sometimes a sound picture is more than one.  Each sound in his name has its own picture,  or letter.  I chunk the letters into syllables and say the sounds as I point to each phonogram:

For very young children, especially with long names, this is a good start.  Later I might take out the P and ask him to put it back where the /p/ sound goes.  Or have him point to the part of the word that is "dex."  But as mentioned before, that's about all his memory files can hold.


For a little older child (older 3, 4), I would later play with the letters a bit, move them around, and tell him,  "If we move these letters here, your name would be

   

(or   OBB or NANA or whatever you have).


Once I'm sure he knows what sound each phonogram represents, I might take some of the letters in his name to spell new words-- if that's not practical, you can add a new letter to make a nice rhyme. The main thing is to keep the sounds the same as they are pronounced in the child's name (instead of, for example, taking "Cristy" and spelling the word "city."  Try adding an M for "misty" instead.)

So our little Poindexter might see me make words like point, pet, den, Ted, text (adding an extra t) and net.  But at this point I would not separate the O and I, because in his name, they represent a single sound.

Of course, some names don't have enough sounds to get terribly creative:  Ed, Al, Bo.  Mae.  That's fine.  You don't want to focus on more than 3-4 sounds at a time, anyway.  You can add one or two letters just to give you something to play with.  Ed, plus a "b" and an "r" perhaps (bed, red), or Al with a "p" and "s" (pal, Sal).  Mae would be easier to rhyme with real words if you had spelled it May (though either way it still has only two phonograms-- M AE  vs M AY)  but you can always add f and r to spell Fae and Rae.

In the name at the top of this post, there are 6 phonograms:  B  R  AE  L  Y  N.  Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of combinations of these phonograms that will make actual words, so it might be easier instead to simply move the letters around:

"What would your name be if we took out the /b/ sound? " (Remove the B to spell  Raelyn.)
" What if we took out the /r/ instread? "  (Remove the R to spell  Baelyn.)
"Or what if we switched the /r/ and /l/?"  (Move the letters to spell  Blae-ryn.)

The important thing is that your student begins to understand that the letters represent sounds, and when you change the letters around or switch them out with other letters, you get a new word.  (Granted, it may be an imaginary word like "tob," but that's okay!)

You may want to encourage your child to try writing her name.  That's great-- most children are excited and proud to be able to write their own name-- but if she resists, please don't push it.  Fine motor skills that allow a child to control a pencil can take time to develop.

If your child is not yet ready to try printing her name,  she can continue to play with the 3-D letters, model some with play-dough, even stamp them onto paper using stamps or foam letters and paint.  Writing in a tray of sand or baking soda helps children get a feel for the the correct motions. But if your child is very young,  accuracy in letter formation is not really the point.

Understanding that the letters she is writing represent the sounds in a spoken word is the point.

At the end of each session, of course, you would want to have your child spell his own name correctly with the letters, helping him if necessary: "Which sound comes first?  Which letter shows that sound? (Note:  people do commonly speak of letters making sounds,  but to be most accurate, letters never actually make noise at all.  They just record in print the sounds that people make.)

After a few short sessions of playing with the sounds in her own name (depending on how many sounds you have to work with, it may keep you occupied for a while), keep adding in letters a few at a time. Eventually you will have the whole alphabet.  Stick to adding single-letter phonograms at first.  If the child's name has a multi-letter phonogram, of course, work with it "as is," using the same sound, for a while before you introduce the sounds for its individual letters:

You wouldn't go directly from learning Jean to spelling an, for example, because "a" does not stand by itself in the name.  Instead, you would first make rhymes like bean and mean.

A name like  H  ay  l  eigh  has 4 phonograms, but two are multi-letter, so you first might want to play around with the order of the sounds to make "Layheigh"  "Leigh-hay," and then make rhymes like Cayleigh and Tayleigh for a few sessions,  before eventually introducing the fact that the letter "a" by itself can be a picture of the sound /a/ in "cat."

As you add new letters, help your child be alert to the same sounds in other words.  Audrey and autumn share the same beginning sound, as do Casey and cat, Bentley and baseball.

So, a little bit at a time, you continue to play with the letters, adding new information gradually as the old is absorbed.  Before too long, your child will be reading on his own.

In a later post, I will explain how using colored pencils to mark words as he reads and writes can accelerate his mastery of spelling and reading.