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By Diane Coetzer
Your Child Magazine, South Africa
Winter 2006
Learning to read is a huge milestone,
and perfecting the skill takes years. How does it happen and how can
parents help?
The first question that comes up is usually, “When should they learn
to read?” Although there is a move towards formal introduction of
reading and writing before children enter Grade 1, Lorayne Excell,
Head of the Wits School of Education’s Early Childhood Development,
says parents should exercise caution before flashing letter charts
in front of their 4-year-olds. “I am of the opinion that children
are better off developing and internalising vital perceptual motor
skills in the pre-school phase, up until Grade R,” this highly
experienced educator says.
This does not mean that you cannot lay the foundation for reading
and writing during these early years. “It’s important to encourage
the early skills from which reading will grow,” says Vivien
Linnington, lecturer in Human Development and Social Context at the
Wits School of Education. “The awareness of sound, the
differentiation between sounds, the sight skill, the environmental
print skill, like recognising the McDonald’s sign – these are all
very important as is encouraging a love for books.”
Amazingly, pre-reading skills are also laid down when children move!
Spatial orientation is very important for the skill of reading
correctly from left to right and for distinguishing potentially
confusing letters like “b” and “d”. Excell is adamant that gross
motor skills are a key to unlocking reading in children from the
start. “That’s how you develop your spatial orientation and learn to
do essential things, like cross the midline,” she says. Perceptual
means seeing and motor means moving, two essential skills for
reading. When you are reading, you are seeing something with your
eyes, and then your nervous system has to process those letters.
What comes next is integration, followed by the output of reading.”
Kirsty Francis, a teacher at Crawford Preparatory School in Sandton,
says that learning to read is a combination of a whole lot of
things. “It’s about maturity and a readiness to read, as well as the
classroom environment and teaching strategies. But there is also a
lot left up to the magic in the process. Children are naturally
curious about reading and do incidental reading before they get to
the formal reading programme. Recognising a Disney DVD log or a
Barbie logo forms part of that and it should be encouraged and
affirmed in the home.”
Parents often worry about their children’s progress, particularly if
there are very early readers in the class. Says Excell, "“the skills
and concepts on which children base their reading and writing are
refined at the age of about 6 or 7. Some children do read a lot
earlier, and if they are going to pick it up naturally, why stop
them? But there is a catch in that some children don’t refine the
perceptual motor skills and concepts that are needed for reading.
They may learn to read on memory alone and they can eventually
struggle. Sometimes these children do well in Grade 1 and Grade 2
but then hit a wall because they are being exposed to so many
different words that they can no longer rely on their memory. There
are reading recovery programmes for these children currently
underway in places like New Zealand, aimed at giving children those
skills outside of sight and memory words.”
Your child’s teacher, and how how well his peers are doing, is the
best gauge of his ability. Francis says, “It is very important for
parents to attend their parent-teacher evenings during the
foundation phase. It’s here that we go through how we teach the
children to read – and this does vary from school to school – and
what we expect from parents in terms of reading homework.”
When should you be concerned? “Parents are getting worried a great
deal earlier, especially in these competitive times,” says Excell.
“But I would say that if you feel your child really hasn’t made any
progress by the middle of Grade 2 and the teacher has not called you
in for a chat, make an appointment to discuss your child’s reading.”
The school’s approach will also have a bearing. At Waldorf Schools,
for example, academics are de-emphasised in the early years of
schooling. Letters are introduced artistically in class 2, with the
children learning to read from their own writing in class 2 or 3.
Montessori schools teach children to read and write in a
multi-sensory approach. Games of “I Spy” initially get children to
identify the first, last and middle sounds in words. Then sandpaper
letters are used to combine a “sound” with a “symbol” and are
introduced even before children learn the names of the letters.
Through the letters children hear the sound, see its representation
in the form of a letter and feel the way it is written by tracing
over the sandpaper letter. Finally, a moveable alphabet is
introduced to enable children to “write” or construct their own
words, as the start to reading them.
Reading is made up of four key elements, explains Linnington. It’s
when these are all in place that a child reads.
Phonics is the system of associating letter symbols with their
speech sound. Phonics helps a child spell out “cat” through using
the sound each of those three letters represents.
Sight words are the many words in the English language that cannot
be “unpacked” through phonics. A word like “the” is a good example
of a sight word that needs to be read as a whole (in a chunk),
utilising a child’s memory. That’s why the repetition in storybooks
read to a pre-reader lays an important building block for later
reading.
Contextual analysis is the very important skill of prediction when
reading. Visual clues used in early reading and reading books
(especially those that directly relate to the children’s specific
world) become important. Encourage this skill at an early age by
asking your child, when reading to him, “What do you think is going
to happen next?”
Structural analysis is based on the fact that there is a root to
words and a child can work out more difficult words using this
knowledge. “Happiness” comes from “happy”, for example.
Keep the experience positive. Don’t get irritated with your child if
he struggles over a word. A whole lot of elements need to come
together for reading, and if one of those (like a perceptual motor
skill) is not yet developed, this will affect the pace, though not
necessarily the outcome, of learning to read.
Avoid competition at all costs! The fact that your friend’s child
was reading at the age of 4 is no indication that your child is
“slow” – remember your child learns at his own pace and most
children acquire similar reading skills by the age of 8. The basics
remain the same. Read to and with your children, creating a feeling
of warmth, love and togetherness that the magic of the written word
brings.
Encouraging a love of reading depends in part on how you handle
their reading homework and general reading at home. “The child’s
self esteem and confidence to want to read is very important,”
stresses Linnington.
Kirsty Francis advises, “Try and set aside time you can honour for
reading at home. Make a special place where you and your child can
read. I know it’s hard in bigger families and when parents are
working, but a sense of security, focused attention and sharing is
invaluable for your child.”
A new approach
When I first see Alan Davies he’s up on a ladder, hanging lecture
material in a room at the Wits School of Education. It’s not where I
expected to find the creator of the new phonics teaching method that
is shaking up the educational system, but Davies is hands-on when it
comes to spreading THRASS (Teaching Handwriting, Reading And
Spelling Skills), which is currently being introduced into many
schools here.
Before long Davies has me mesmerised as he hauls out his laptop and
demonstrates the Phoneme Machine which, in spite of its quaint name,
is a very modern educational tool designed for parents and teachers
to use on their computers.
Davies, an educational psychologist and former teacher created the
THRASS methodology and philosophy as a way of moving beyond the
phonic/initial sound method of teaching (where one letter makes one
sound) which he describes as “unrealistic”. I became a dad and
wasn’t sure how we learnt to spell and read. So I started working
with my own daughter. It became clear that the way children were
taught was unsatisfying. My daughter’s name is Jenny and I couldn’t
understand why
anyone would want to tell her that she had a ‘yo yo man’ or the
phonetic sound ‘y’ at the end of her name. It was from that
experience that the journey to THRASS began. “I came across the fact
that there are 44 sounds in English. But we all know that there are
only 26 letters, so it follows that each letter cannot make a sound.
If you have 44 sounds, but only 26 letters, you must use the letters
in combination to help you read”.
He elaborates, “If you take the word ‘south’, the sound made by the
‘o’ and the ‘u’ does not come from saying ‘o’ for octopus and ‘u’
for umbrella, which means children have to abandon the rule of ‘one
letter makes one sound’ to figure this out. My feeling was: why
don’t we tell children from the very beginning that an o and a u
together makes that middle sound in south? So basically I produced a
grid that has been likened to the periodic table of phonics.”
THRASS teaches about the building blocks of reading and spelling,
the 44 speech sounds (20 vowel sounds and 24 consonants) that may be
represented by different letters and different combinations of
letters. According to Davies it teaches metacognitive strategies
(thinking skills) to empower learners with lifelong word-solving
skills.
THRASS educators will be running courses for South African parents
during 2006. In the meantime, Davies says the Phoneme Machine was
developed to assist parents to become more confident about the
sounds and spelling choices in the THRASS method. Check out
www.phonememachine.com,
www.thrass.co.uk,
www.phonics4parents.co.uk, and
www.thrass-tips.co.uk
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