Before the ABCs how to start children on the path to literacy Brenda Erickson
I want to talk to you about teaching
children to read.
Because what we’re doing is not working.
Globally, according to UNESCO, 56% of
primary school aged children
are not reaching minimum proficiency
levels in reading.
Surprisingly, they add that most children
who are not learning, are in school.
I’m a Montessori teacher.
I have taught pre-school children to read
for almost four decades.
When I hear a parent very proudly saying,
“My child knows the ABCs,”
my heart sinks.
Because I know I must move all that
information aside
in order to teach that child to read.
We do not read with the names of letters.
We read with the sounds of letters.
Reading is like music.
Music comes from the sound of a note,
not the name of a note.
Reading comes from the sound of a letter,
not the name of a letter.
For the child who was taught ABCs first,
such as “a says ah as in apple,”
it usually takes six months to a year
longer to sort out the sounds
and begin to read.
Stop teaching the names of letters first.
Instead, start early teaching the sounds
of letters.
Consider what must be sorted through:
twenty-six letter names, twenty-six letter
sounds, twenty-six upper case letters,
twenty-six lower case letters, and
twenty-six stories to go with the letters.
Snake, octopus, monkey, apple…
From baby books to toys to typical
classrooms,
we force pre-school children to untangle
one hundred thirty pieces of information,
most of which are not needed
to learn to read.
Research confirms that young children
being read to and talked to
assimilate all the speech sounds in their
environment during the first year of life.
Through the following years, with the
sounds of speech in place,
learning to read begins by simply
attaching symbols to those sounds.
Stanislas Dehaene in the conclusion of his
book Reading in the Brain states,
“All children, regardless of their
socioeconomic background,
benefit from explicit and early teaching
of the correspondence between letters
and speech sounds.”
Connecting those letters to their sounds
is just another example of object labeling
for the child.
One letter, one sound.
“This is mm, can we find mm on this page?”
Focus on lower case symbols, because that
is what children see most often in books.
Children are driven to learn.
On one occasion, when I was working with
children living in poverty,
one little boy who had just turned 3,
insisted on participating.
His experience with letter sounds was
purely through play with six letters.
So I said those letters out.
He looked at me with indignation and
disbelief.
He swept up all six letters, held them up
one at a time,
correctly stating the sound of each.
Then he looked around and behind me, to
see if there were more.
In essence, he was saying, “Enough
already! I know these. I’m here for more.”
Keep in mind, he learned six letters
informally through play
when he was 2 years old.
And he was there for more.
Typically, the names of letters, the ABCs,
are the primary focus
until a child is 4-5 years of age.
But we don’t read with
the names of letters.
And unlearning is really hard.
By shifting that early focus to the most
common sounds of letters
children begin reading by 4-5.
Clearly, little people, are given years to
learn to dress and eat independently.
Likewise, they should have the same wide
window of time to learn to read.
Children are surrounded by print,
but they don’t know how it all
fits together with speech sounds.
Figuring it out is one of the most
consequential tasks in a lifetime.
To help them, start early.
Engage, engage with the environment.
Choose two or three letter sounds to
teach,
make sure the child is confident
identifying those few sounds
before adding another.
Children are able to identify a letter of
a sound when they hear that sound,
before they sometimes can say that sound.
A child who says, “I want to read,”
deserves to have the most common letter
sound associations already in place.
The secondary sounds, such as
the “c” in “city” or the “e” in “ego,”
upper case letters, letter names,
or more complicated quirks
of a language come later.
If we continue to teach the
names of letters first, the ABCs,
the children who learn to read are doing
so in spite of us.
We are asking all children to struggle
unnecessarily.
We all can help children learn to read
in a more logical, natural,
and seamless way.
Talk to children differently.
Whether you are in the grocery
store with your toddler,
or in a conversation
with a friend’s child,
“Look, this is eh,”
“Do you see the mm on her shirt?”
“Can you hear the tt in Tuesday?”
“Let’s go look for ss down this aisle!”
Stop teaching the ABCs first.
Trust our youngest children with the
actual tools of print,
the sounds of the letters.
Those little analytical minds will do the
work of reading, one sound at a time.