Reading with a Baby

Before going further you should know that I consider my reading expertise to kick in around, say, four years old. So this post is based on some stuff I've been reading and how I've seen it play out with my own actual baby. A research group of one. So take it or leave it.

I think there is no special formula for reading with your baby. Except DO NOT BUY THAT INSANE BABY FLASHCARD READING PROGRAM. Unless you hope to raise an automaton who is incapable of actually thinking. Just saying. Just look at books together and talk about them. Read the books (meaning read the words of the books rather than just talking about what's in the pictures) when you can, and when your baby wants to skip ahead or go back, you can do that, too. If you don't finish the book, it's OK. If your baby wants you to read a book for the hundredth time and you happen to hate that book, skipping a few pages will not do any damage. If your baby wants to get up and walk around her room and you are in the middle of your bedtime book, keep reading it. It's OK if she's not right there next to you. When she is right there next to you, invite her to participate. She can turn the pages or fill in a missing word that you strategically leave out. I guess I'm saying, do what feels right. For both of you. You don't want reading to feel like a chore.

Now, in a teeny nutshell, here's some interesting research that's helping me refine how I think about reading. This research has to do with language learning, but I am thinking about it in terms of literacy learning and it makes sense. So check this out:

OK, we have attentional following and attentional redirection.

Imagine you're out pushing your stroller and you hear your baby make a noise. You peek over the stroller and see your baby looking to the side, where a tree is growing. You say, "Ooh, what's that? That's a tree. Look at all those leaves! They're just turning orange, but some are still green. That's a big tree." This is attentional following. You are noticing what your baby is already attending to and providing a lot of language to go with that. Research shows that babies acquire language most effectively when it surrounds things that they are already paying attention to.

Now, imagine the same scenario. Except when you peek around the stroller to chat with your baby, you say, "Hello, sweetie! Yes, we're going to the store. We're going to get some crackers!" This is attentional redirection. You are providing language, but the context is all mixed up. Your baby has a tree on his mind, and you're talking about things that have nothing to do with trees. It is harder for babies to acquire language this way.

So what does this have to do with reading?

Let me illustrate with school-age reading first. Many adults have a tendency to guide children toward their own particular interpretation of a book. Meaning, we see a right way and a wrong way of understanding what's going on in a book. If we think children are misunderstanding a book, we might redirect them to our own way of thinking. There are a couple of problems with this. First, it doesn't leave a lot of room for debate or discussion about the meaning of the book. Debate and discussion about meanings of books is what sort of defines the adult reading experience, so these things are important to develop young. Second, and related, is that when we tell children how to interpret what they read, we are not teaching them how to interpret what they read. We need to let them approximate (this means basically that we need to let them try, make mistakes, think about their mistakes, and try again. Approximation is another one of those conditions of learning I mentioned in my post of March 2, 2009). More on talking to kids about books later. For now, back to babies.

When I read with my son, he often wants to read the single most annoying book in his collection, despite my efforts to hide it under his giant dog pillow. My usual habit of redirection means I try to make him choose another book. I'm guessing the research is telling me to follow his attention and read the book I don't like. Then, when I do, he doesn't always follow along the way the book goes. Or at least he doesn't always put his attention on the things I think are most important. So we'll be looking at a page of his book, and way over in the corner a zoo employee is feeding fish to a seal. Huck says, "fish." I want to direct him back to the actual narrative and say, "Look here, sweetie, the animal wants to stay in the zoo with all the other animals. Here's a lion, and these guys are combing his hair. This animal wants his hair combed, too." But this would be attentional redirection. So now I try to say, "Oh, look! The seal is eating fish. They are feeding fish to that seal there. We saw that one time at the zoo." Then I might continue to read the actual text in the book. I'm still getting used to this. I think I already see a difference, but so do people who take sugar pills in experiments, right? I mean, maybe I just see a difference because I think I should?

Anyway, I think I'm seeing Huck become more engaged with his books, looking more carefully at the pictures and talking more about what he sees. I believe this is because I am following his attention more, talking to him about the things he wants to focus on, rather than the things I am focused on. I guess I'm giving him a little more ownership over his reading experience, and that can't be bad.

"Too easy" is just right!!!

OK, if there's one thing I think parents really don't understand, it's this. Don't get me wrong...there's no reason parents should understand this. It's completely counterintuitive!

Here's the deal. In America, we have a mythology built up around the value of hard work. No guts, no glory. No pain, no gain. The classic American story describes the poor so-and-so, born into modest circumstances. Nothing came easy, but through hard work and determination, blood, sweat, and tears, this so-and-so became a CEO. Have you heard this one? It's a good story. Hard work IS important.

The problem is, it doesn't work this way with reading. I have a suitcase full of research to back me up on this one, but please don't make me go get it. What it shows is that in order to become better readers children need a lot of time every day reading EASY books. That's right. EASY. In the lower levels, there may be a word or two that children have to grapple with, but starting at about the level of Henry & Mudge books, children should be able to figure out 99% or more of the words without having to slow down too much. That means that when you see your child struggling, something is wrong. The book is too hard. This is not a good thing to see. Children need to read with accuracy and fluency in order to have good comprehension. It should not be a struggle. I like to live by the following rule of thumb: If it sounds like torture, it is.

Why do their books need to be easy, and how are they getting better if they are not working hard? Well, reading is not the same as lifting weights. I mean, reading muscles don't grow by being taxed. Or, more accurately, the reading muscles we need to tax are not the ones involved in decoding (the ones we can see working when a book is too hard), they are the ones used to comprehend (the ones we can't see working when we watch a child reading). If your child can decode a chapter book like Horrible Harry or Junie B. Jones, she can decode almost anything. From this point on, books get more demanding not because they have harder words, but because they have harder concepts, plot structures, settings, character development methods, and themes.

So next time you find yourself thinking your child's book is too easy, think again. Ask her what the book is about, what's going on with the characters, how she feels about it, what she thinks will happen next, what it reminds her of, or anything else you'd ask an adult friend about her book!

Just to let you know

I just want to say that I have a deadline in January for a book, and that's why I have not been posting! This will be my fourth book for teachers, on teaching reading. Sorry!

I'm going to try to do short sweet posts for parents , though.

Sounding it- Out the Responsible Way

OK, so one of my mantras is, "Don't say sound it out. Ever." I'm going to stick by that, at least for now, but in the mean time I want to talk about helping kids use letter/sound information in a way that actually means something.

What we need to think about is how much kids are ready for in terms of making the connections between letters and the sounds they make, and then blending those sounds together, listening as they do so to make sure they are making a word, and adjusting as necessary. This is a pretty complicated process. Children do not just suddenly learn it.

Let me illustrate with a small story about my son. You probably have your own version of this story. When he first started talking, he pronounced 'milk' as 'mmm.' After a while, he would say something that sounded like 'miw.' Still later it was 'meeyoo.' He was pretty excited when he got the ending sound and he said it a lot for a while: 'miyuk' with a lot of emphasis on the /k/. Nowadays it sounds almost like 'milk' but the /l/ is still a little tricky. This has been MONTHS of approximation.

Reading and writing happen the same way. Children start out wherever they start out and gradually over time make their way closer and closer to the target.

So back to sounding it out. Here is an abbreviated set of steps children generally take as they move toward learning how to sound words out. But please remember that sounding words out without also thinking about meaning is not reading!

Also, knowing all the letters and/or their sounds is not a prerequisite for these things. That often happens alongside these steps.

Your child might...

• recognize some letters in what they are reading (they may also recognize some whole words, but that's a different conversation)
• memorize books or parts of books, then be able to actually point to some of the words they are saying (like repeated refrains or parts in a different typeface)
• use the beginning of a word to try to predict what the word will be (we call this predicting and not guessing because guessing implies that children are not using any information. When they predict, they use the fist sound of the word, and also their knowledge of what would make sense based what's going on in the book). Instead of saying, "Sound it out," try to prompt children to do this by saying, "get your mouth ready." This is the very beginning of sounding it out.
• Somewhere in here, children get pretty good at decoding simple words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern (CVC words in the trade). Dog and cat are two good examples of these. The short vowel sounds are sort of the easiest vowel sounds to deal with early on. Instead of saying SIO with these words, try, "Put the sounds together."
• The next thing children might be able to do is look for familiar groups of letters that make a predictable sound. These are called onsets and rimes, but many teachers call them chunks. sp- and -ent are chunks. We don't sound out the letters separately. Instead we take them in almost as a single sound. Early on, children may know a small number of these chunks. They can make the sound of the chunk accurately, and try to predict the rest of the word. For instance if the word is together, children might first see to as a familiar chunk, and then try to predict the rest based on context. Instead of SIO, try, "Do you see any chunks you recognize?"
• As they learn more of these chunks they get better and better at putting them together to figure out words.
• The next stuff they start to learn is how different letter combinations affect vowel sounds. This is REALLY confusing, and takes a long time to figure out. Kids may recognize that a silent e makes an earlier vowel long (as in hike), but have no idea that a single consonant after the vowel in a multisyllabic word (as in hiking) also makes the vowel long. This is partly because it is more complicated, and partly because it is not as consistent a rule. Most CVC words have a short vowel, but many CVCe words do not have a long vowel. Have and love are common counterexamples to the rule. Instead if SIO, try, "remember how the vowel sounds when x is happening in the word," or something like that.
• So the more kids read, the more words they learn, the more new words they can learn by comparing them to their growing repertoire of memorized words. When they start reading books similar to Henry and Mudge, or thereabouts, they are able to do what we mean when we say, "sound it out." Except that we don't say that anymore. Instead of SIO, try "You know all these chunks because you've seen them in other words. First let's look at them all separately, then you can put them together to figure out the word."
• During every one of these stages, "what would make sense here?" is also a really great prompt. It reminds children to hold onto meaning even as they are focusing on letters and sounds."

This is a pretty short primer on early reading, but it should get you started, and arm you with some less frustrating ways to help your child through. And just so you know, all these steps typically happen over a 3 year period. So let your child spend a long time getting good at each thing. Remember, they get better at reading by reading a lot. They get better at reading by reading books that FEEL EASY, and they want to keep reading when they feel GOOD AT IT.

Let me know how it goes!

What is Reading?

I'm hoping to keep this short, so forgive me if I oversimplify.

Reading is constructing meaning from text.

OK, well I guess I don't need to keep it that short.

Many adults who do not work in fields involving teaching, reading, or writing, mistake the concept of reading with the concept of decoding. Decoding is just saying the words. Decoding is what you do when you read this:

blophen gribluck weevin smid.

You use your knowledge of English to pronounce these words in a particular way. You probably didn't concern yourself too much with thinking about what was being communicated because you could tell early on that this was nonsense. You are still decoding when you read this:

With door black onion.

These are words, of course, so you are no longer looking at nonsense. Each of these words makes something happen in your brain. When you put them together it all sort of falls apart, though. When you read that last bit, you read it as a list of words, not as a chunk of meaning.

So we know what decoding is. Now let's talk about reading.

Reading is decoding PLUS thinking. (Don't worry, I'm not going to try to define thinking here.) Reading is saying the words, putting them together to figure out what is being communicated, thinking about what we already know about that, thinking about how we feel about it, being reminded of other things we experienced or read about, wondering new things, predicting words, ideas, events, or changes that may come later in the text. And there's more. When you read, saying the words is only the beginning. After that a whole lot of other things happen in your head. That's part of what makes it so rewarding!

When we help our kids read, we need to recognize this. They don't learn to decode first and only then make meaning. They must learn to make meaning, or do all that thinking work, AS they learn to decode. Even in the easiest of books! So when you are sitting with your little one reading a book, take a look at your input. Do you talk mostly about decoding, saying things like, "sound it out," or "you know that word, " or "look at that word again, is that right?" or "no, that's not what it says there"? If so, you are not alone, but you can do something about it. For every decoding-type thing you say, try to say TWO meaning-oriented things, like:

• What's going on here?
• Look at the picture
• That was funny
• I love this part
• Oh, no! He tore his shirt!
• Ooooh, she's going to be in trouble
• That was a nice thing to do
• What a good friend!

These are the type of comments that show our children that reading is a social act. When they read, they too will begin to comment more on the meaning than on the strategies they are using to figure out words.

Don't Say Sound it Out!!

Just don't say it!

This is a tool that one must fully understand in order to use it correctly!

Here's the deal. You can ask any child who just successfully figured out a word, "How did you do that?" and most of the time the answer will be, "I sounded it out." But most of the time that's not actually what she did! See, SIO has become a meaningless catch-all. I want children to use a wide variety of strategies to figure out words and I want them to have some awareness about what strategies they are using and how they work. I want that child to say, "I looked at the beginning of the word and it was a /th/ sound and the girl in the picture was throwing a ball so I tried 'throw' and that made sense, so then I looked at the rest of the letters and they all worked to make the rest of the sounds of 'throw'."

Also, the most appropriate strategy to use depends heavily on what your child can already do. You might more simply equate this with book level. Certain levels of books require children to use certain strategies. In very early books children should look at the pictures to help figure out words, and maybe sometimes look at the first letter. Children should not be 'sounding words out'- looking through the letters of the word left to right and blending the sounds together- until they are already reading pretty well. I'm not going to get into what strategies to use with what levels because that would be a really long long long post. However, there is sort of an order to things.

This is not exhaustive...

• Look at the picture
• Remember the words you know by heart. (Children should not try to 'sound out,' or decode, high frequency words such as the, it, and, me, etc. These should be memorized and recognized instantly. Most early books have just a few of these.)
• Look at the first letter(s) and make the sound (sometimes we call this getting your mouth ready. It is a precursor to sounding words out)
• Look for parts of words you know (if you know str- or -ike then you can figure out strike just by connecting those two chunks. This also applies to affixes, like re- or -tion)
• Always be paying attention to what would make sense or sound right. This is not guessing. This is predicting and we adults do it all the time.

If your child is struggling to figure out a word for a long time and is becoming frustrated, if you are becoming frustrated, if the connection to the meaning of the book is getting lost because of this one dumb word, just tell it to him! If there are several words like this (more than 1% in a chapter book. Yes, you heard right, children need to read with 99% accuracy in order to become better readers) change books. Reading should be easy. EASY. This idea does not compute for most of us. In our culture we believe that success comes from facing struggles and working really hard. We say, "no pain, no gain," and "nothing worth getting was ever gotten the easy way." But reading doesn't work like that. All the research shows that in order to become better readers (and therefore to go up through the levels of books, if that's what matters) children must have a lot of time reading books that are EASY. In chapter books this means over 99% accuracy. In very early books (with one sentence on a page) sometimes one error is already 5% of the words, so the rule in books with fewer words is a little less stringent. Regardless of level, children need to feel successful in their reading if they are going to put in the time that is required for further success. (Read the post on praise for some ideas on how to help children feel successful)

And try some other ways to support your child in figuring out words!

In Praise of Praise

So imagine you are having some friends over for dinner. You have chosen an exciting new recipe, bought interesting ingredients, slaved all day in a hot kitchen, and even put a drizzle of something expensive onto the plate. You serve it up and your friends say, "That was good. you should have put in some thyme though." The "that was good" part of the comment sort of disappears beneath the rest of it. This is how a lot of children hear "nice work" when we say it. It essentially has no meaning.

When you read (or write or do anything else) with your child, be on the lookout for opportunities to give a nice, fat, juicy compliment. And make it specific. 

• I love how you pointed to each word right when you were saying it, and when you ran out of words but were still reading, you went back to fix the mistake. That was so amazing for me to see. Did it feel good for you?
• Wow! Last time we read this you didn't know this word, but this time you read it like a real pro!
• You know, lately when I listen to you reading, it sounds so smooth. It used to sound. kind. of. choppy. but. now it sounds almost like talking. Have you been working on that?

You get the idea.

So why is it important to give praise like this in the first place? I mean, why not just keep saying "nice work"? Well, I don't want to bore you with the research, but you should know that there is research showing that response is a critical condition of learning. When children do something well, they need an authority on the subject to tell them so. Not only does this help them continue to do whatever it was they did well, but it also creates a feeling of success, which helps them take the risks necessary to do other things well.

So if you notice a few things not going so well, do not allow yourself to address any of them until you have crafted a lovely, specific, meaningful compliment. 

Why Memorizing is NOT Cheating

So you are reading this right now pretty quickly, much more quickly than a young child would. How are you doing this? You have a sight vocabulary of many thousands of words. In regular person language, this means you have a lot of words memorized. Almost all the words you read are memorized. So when you read, you see whole words. You put these together to make meaning. Congratulations! 

But what did you do in the face of all these daunting black squiggles on the page back when you were a little person who didn't yet possess this amazing skill? Well, you did a number of things. ONE of them was sounding words out, but that didn't come until you were already a little bit of a reader. Believe it or not, sounding out words is a pretty advanced skill, which comes after a few other things in the reading teacher's playbook.

So back to memorizing. If your child's books have highly patterned language and highly supportive pictures, memorizing the pattern and using the pictures to figure out the part that changes is the most effective way to make meaning. So the book goes like this:

The dog is walking (picture of a dog walking)

The dog is jumping (picture of a dog jumping)

The dog is sleeping (yes, picture of a dog sleeping)

and so on

Do not try to get your child to sound out all these words. If the book is a good fit, the words may still be too hard to decode in this way. Instead, talk about the book as you look at the pictures together. 

Say, "Oooh, look at all the things the dog is doing! What is the dog doing here?" Then your young genius will say, "The dog is walking." That's when you say, "Wow, that's exactly what the book says! Here, say that again and point under the words this time. I bet they'll match up!" Now the child should say, "The dog is walking," WHILE POINTING to the words. The finger and voice may not stay synced, so your job here is to coach your child to point to the same word she is saying, right as she says it. You may have to demonstrate, or go back and forth. Make sure to give lots of compliments and do lots of cheerleading. That's what will make your child want to keep on trying.

At the end, don't forget to talk about what the book was about, even in a sentence or two. The purpose of reading is not to say words, but to make meaning.

In order to be able to work on this skill of matching spoken words to printed words, children have to memorize the text. They are putting plenty of mental energy into trying to get their fingers synced up to their voices, so don't worry that this is some kind of easy way out.

As children get older and their books get harder, they will move away from this and into more rigorous decoding. This phase can't last too long, because as soon as children outgrow heavily patterned books, they're forced to move beyond memorizing.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

Do Book Levels Matter?

A parent recently asked me how to tell what her daughter's book level was. I wondered why she wanted to know. It seemed to me like one of the joys of being a parent and not a teacher is that you don't have to concern yourself with leveling. You can just read. But of course she just wanted to know how to help her daughter choose books in the book store or library. I feel like when I was little we just picked out books that looked interesting, and flipped through a few pages to see if they felt about right. Now so many books seem to be slotted into a hierarchy. 

Now as a former teacher and a consultant who works with teachers all over the country, I'm familiar enough with book levels to know that it's a Babel of different systems. Is your child a G? a 17? A 1.8? And even when publishers claim to use a system, the person whose job it is to level the books may have different ideas than the person who has that job at another publisher. There is just not a lot of consistency out there. So my first answer is to ignore anything you see on a book that has to do with a level. If you're not convinced, try this. Go to your local book store. Go to one with a good children's book section. Pick three "I Can Read" level 3 books and look inside. Do they all seem to be the same? Maybe, but maybe not, depending on the titles. OK, now try a "Ready Reader" level 3. Is it the same? Try another imprint or another level. Once you start looking you'll see. It's meaningless. 

So how do teachers know? Well, hopefully your child's school has chosen a system and everybody uses it. (Resource Room or Reading Recovery teachers may use another system. They're allowed.) These systems take into account things like number of words per page, font size and spacing, picture size and relevance, number of multisyllabic words, complex sentences, repetition, inflected endings (like -ed), and clarity of story, to name just a few things. But the other thing teachers use is their particular experience. They have read a million children's books and have watched children learning to read them They know what is going to be tricky and how to help. They also know what is appropriate to expect at what levels and when it's time to teach a given strategy. They know how to tell what sorts of strategies your child already uses to decode and understand what he reads. It's pretty impressive, actually.

This is just not feasible for a parent, nor is it necessarily desirable. School reading and home reading are different. As a parent you do not always have to teach something new. You can function more as a coach, partner, cheerleader, or audience. So back to the level question. How do you help your child choose books well? Try this:

Take your child to the book store/library. Start with a few books that seem about right. If they are pretty short (anything up to a Frog and Toad type book) read a few pages and then say, "Oooh, this looks good. It seems to be about x." X being a brief teaser that gives a little information but tantalizes the young reader into wanting to find out more. If you see any obviously hard words ahead of time, include these in your introduction. Like this: "Oh, and the farmer's daughter also tries to help pull up that pesky turnip." Then hand it over. Does it feel good? Is your child reading along with a bit of confidence and some fluency? Not stumbling over too many words? Only needing a bit of help and only once every, say 10-20 words? Understanding what she reads? Able to tell back what she just read? Good! Get that book! 

If not, you need to get something a little less challenging. You cannot even hint that this might be disappointing, though. Instead, try to make it seem like the best luck in the world. Like this: "Oh, phew, I was hoping we could spend some time reading these cool 'Brand New Readers' (or some other book that is more appropriate than the one you just tried)! They are so-o-o-o-o good and there are so many characters we can get to know! What LUCK!"

(These are lovely books, by the way. Brand New Readers is an imprint of Candlewick Press. I have nothing to do with this publisher and will not profit from the sale of their books, but I do like them.)

I guess what I think is important for parents to know is not what level your child reads, but whether your child enjoys reading and feels successful at it. If it feels like torture, it is. Make it stop now. The quickest way into higher level books is by spending quality time in books that feel comfortable.