by Jan Pierce, M.Ed
If you’ve homeschooled for years, this won’t be news to you. Some children take to reading like a duck takes to water. They barely require any instruction. If they’ve been read to all their preschool years, they’re ready to launch out on their own and all they need is plenty of books.
Sadly, there are those children for whom decoding all those squiggles is a real challenge. They may have visual memory problems, eye tracking problems, and who knows what other barriers to learning the letters and sounds. They’re frustrated after learning the two sounds of the letter “o” and then trying to read the word “come.” It just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s true. Our English language is not a highly phonetic language. Only about fifty percent of our words follow the traditional rules for pronunciation. So just what are the “good readers” doing to solve reading problems as they come to them?
They’re……thinking!
When reading doesn’t come easily, some children become discouraged. Merely reading a sentence with seven or eight words is a huge challenge. They’re focusing letter by letter rather than searching for meaning as they read.
That’s not to say it isn’t a challenge. Learning to read is a system with many subtle skills to learn beyond the simple sounds of each letter or cluster of letters. Imagine yourself learning a brand new language with a new symbol for each sound and multiple sounds per symbol. There would be a giant learning curve. What would it take for you to persevere until you could read that new language fluently?
That’s what we’re asking of our children and it’s vitally important they become successful in reading if they’re to become lifelong learners.
My youngest grandson and I were reading together. He was a second grader and was plowing through a Nate the Great book with less than top enthusiasm. It was hard going. I said to him, “How about this? Let’s talk about this book for a while and then we’re going to read it with our brains. So we went through the setting and the characters. We talked about the title so we had clues to this particular mystery. We looked for key words to help us anticipate new vocabulary. We looked at all the pictures for more clues. Then we began again.
When he came to a difficult word or got “stuck” I counted to seven or eight or ten and waited without supplying the word. My grandson began to search the page and remember what Nate was trying to accomplish and, sure enough, he was able to solve nearly every single problem as we finished the book.
It was a bit of a surprise to him that he could think as he read and figure out many reading problems without painfully sounding out each letter in a difficult word. “Oh, sure, that word is mystery because we’re solving a mystery.” He didn’t have to remember a rule or know that a particular word is an exception to a rule. He just had to think and make sense.
That was a great day for my grandson. He learned he could “read with his brain.”
Jan Pierce, M.Ed., is a retired teacher and author of Homegrown Readers: Simple Ways to Help Your Child Learn to Read. Find Jan at www.janpierce.net
If you’ve homeschooled for years, this won’t be news to you. Some children take to reading like a duck takes to water. They barely require any instruction. If they’ve been read to all their preschool years, they’re ready to launch out on their own and all they need is plenty of books.
Sadly, there are those children for whom decoding all those squiggles is a real challenge. They may have visual memory problems, eye tracking problems, and who knows what other barriers to learning the letters and sounds. They’re frustrated after learning the two sounds of the letter “o” and then trying to read the word “come.” It just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s true. Our English language is not a highly phonetic language. Only about fifty percent of our words follow the traditional rules for pronunciation. So just what are the “good readers” doing to solve reading problems as they come to them?
They’re……thinking!
When reading doesn’t come easily, some children become discouraged. Merely reading a sentence with seven or eight words is a huge challenge. They’re focusing letter by letter rather than searching for meaning as they read.
That’s not to say it isn’t a challenge. Learning to read is a system with many subtle skills to learn beyond the simple sounds of each letter or cluster of letters. Imagine yourself learning a brand new language with a new symbol for each sound and multiple sounds per symbol. There would be a giant learning curve. What would it take for you to persevere until you could read that new language fluently?
That’s what we’re asking of our children and it’s vitally important they become successful in reading if they’re to become lifelong learners.
My youngest grandson and I were reading together. He was a second grader and was plowing through a Nate the Great book with less than top enthusiasm. It was hard going. I said to him, “How about this? Let’s talk about this book for a while and then we’re going to read it with our brains. So we went through the setting and the characters. We talked about the title so we had clues to this particular mystery. We looked for key words to help us anticipate new vocabulary. We looked at all the pictures for more clues. Then we began again.
When he came to a difficult word or got “stuck” I counted to seven or eight or ten and waited without supplying the word. My grandson began to search the page and remember what Nate was trying to accomplish and, sure enough, he was able to solve nearly every single problem as we finished the book.
It was a bit of a surprise to him that he could think as he read and figure out many reading problems without painfully sounding out each letter in a difficult word. “Oh, sure, that word is mystery because we’re solving a mystery.” He didn’t have to remember a rule or know that a particular word is an exception to a rule. He just had to think and make sense.
That was a great day for my grandson. He learned he could “read with his brain.”
Jan Pierce, M.Ed., is a retired teacher and author of Homegrown Readers: Simple Ways to Help Your Child Learn to Read. Find Jan at www.janpierce.net
