Teaching Preschooler to Read

SUBJECT: Preparation for Reading, Writing and Math, Birth-Age 5

TIME REQUIRED: Start with 10 minutes day, gradually increasing to an hour by age 5.

When you educate your child at home, you don't have to draw a line between parenting and teaching. Teaching -- preparing the child for the twelve formal years of classical education -- begins at birth.

PRESCHOOL: BIRTH TO THREE

The best early teaching you can give your child is to immerse her in language from birth.


Reading

Prereading.

Turn off the television;

Talk, talk, talk (adult talk, not baby talk).

Talk to children while you're walking in the park, while you're riding in the car, while you're fixing dinner. Tell them what you're doing, while you're doing it. Example:

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"Now I'm going to send a fax. I put the paper in face-down and punch in the telephone number of the fax machine I'm calling...and then the paper starts to feed through like this."
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"I spilled flour on the floor. I'm going to get out the vacuum cleaner and plug it in. I think I'll use this brush-- it's the furniture brush, but the flour's down in the cracks, so it should work better than the floor brush").

This sort of constant chattering lays a verbal foundation in your child's mind. She's learning that words are used to plan, to think, to explain; she's figuring out how the language organizes words into phrases, clauses, and complete sentences. We have found that children from silent families ("We never really talk much during the day" one mother told us) struggle to read.


Read, read, read.

Start reading chunky books to your baby in his crib. Give her sturdy books that he can look at alone. (A torn book or two is a small price to pay for literacy). Read picture books, pointing at the words with your finger. Read the same books over and over; repetition builds literacy (even as it slowly drives you insane).

Read longer books without pictures while they sit on your lap or wallow on the floor or cut and paste and color.

Read books onto tapes, along with their comments, so that they can listen to you read over and over again. Get an infant-proof tape recorder so that babies can listen to you reading, singing, talking, and telling stories and poems while they play in their cribs.

After you read to your toddler, ask her questions about the story. (Why did the little gingerbread man run away from the little old woman? Why did all the dogs want to go to the top of the tree in Go, Dog, Go? Why did Bananas Gorilla take all the bananas?)

As soon as children begin to talk (which will be early if they're immersed in language like this), teach them the alphabet. Sing the alphabet song whenever you change a diaper (often). Stencil alphabet letters, both capital letters and lowercase letters, to the wall, or put up a chart. Read alphabet rhymes and alphabet books.

When they know the names of the letters, tell them that every letter has a sound, just like animals --(pigs say oink, dogs say woof, and b says b, b, b as in baby).

Start with the sounds of the consonants in the alphabet (that's everything except a, e, i, o, and u). Tell them that b is the sound at the beginning of bat, ball, and Ben; say "T, t, tickle," and "m, m, mommy" and "c, c, cat."

Then tell them that the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are named A, E, I, O, and U. Sing "AEIOU song." Then, teach them that each vowel says a sound, just like an animal --(a as in at, e as in egg, i as in igloo, o as in octopus, and u as in umbrella). These are the short sounds of the vowels, and the only vowel sounds you should teach at first.


Writing

Very young children (under 2 years) will pick up a pencil and imitate scribbling. Teach a child FROM THE BEGINNING to hold the pencil correctly. Draw lots of circles and loops in a counterclockwise direction. Most printed letters use counterclockwise circles; although many children naturally want to draw circles clockwise, this habit will make cursive handwriting very difficult later on. Make snowmen, Slinkies, smoke from a train, car wheels, etc. all in a counterclockwise direction.

Let the child practice making letters without using a pencil. A young child lacks fine-motor maturity, but she can form letters and numbers by writing in rice or sand with her finger, or with chalk on a big chalkboard, or with a crayon or big pencil on large sheets of paper.

Teach 3-year-olds basic dot-to-dot skills. Draw your own dot-to-dot picture (a house, a smiley face) using four or five big dots, and guide the child's crayon from dot to dot so that she can see the picture emerge. Continual drawing and making counterclockwise circles will prepare the preschooler for kindergarten writing.

Math

Start to make your child "mathematically literate" in the toddler years. Just as you read to the toddler, surrounding her with language until he understood that printed words on a page carried meaning, you need to continually expose the child to mathematical processes and language. Only then will she understand that mathematical symbols carry meaning.

Bring numbers into everyday life as often as possible. Start with counting. Count fingers, toes, eyes and ears, toys and treasures, rocks and sticks. Play hide and seek, counting to five and then ten, fifteen or twenty together. Count by twos, fives and tens before shouting "Coming, ready or not!". Play spaceship in cardboard boxes and count backwards for takeoff. Read number books together. Once the child is comfortable counting, you can start working on simple math sums, usually during the Kindergarten-4 (K-4) and K-5 years.


KINDERGARTEN YEARS: FOUR AND FIVE

Rather, you should aim to teach reading and math in the same way that you taught the child to speak, to tie her shoes, to dress, to clean up after himself -- by demonstrating the basic skills yourself, practicing them for a few minutes each day, and talking about them as you go through the routines of life. ("There are four of us. How many spoons should you put on the table so that we can each have one?" "Can you get me the can that says Tomato on it? You'll recognize the T that says t, t, tomato"). You can use charts, tapes, games, workbooks, and stickers if you want to. But you don't need them.

Reading

A classical education relies heavily on the written word. As a parent-educator, your number-one goal should be to have your child reading fluently when he starts first-grade work. Here's the good news: Reading is easy. We'll repeat that: Reading is easy. One more time: Reading is easy.

Reading is easy. Frederick Douglass, not to mention Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and thousands of 18th-century pioneer children, learned to read with the alphabet and a few good books. Douglass learned his ABC's from an adult and the rest of his Reading Competency Skills from street-urchins. Jessie learned to read from a set of alphabet blocks. Between the ages of four and six, any child who has been read to since toddlerhood and is not suffering from an actual organic disorder of some kind can learn to read. And any reasonably literate adult (which includes anyone who can read this book) can serve as tutor for basic phonics skills.

You should continue to immerse four and five-year-olds in language, just as you've been doing since birth. Read with them in the "real world." Read billboards, store names, bumper stickers, cereal boxes in the grocery store, banners at the gas station. Get them books on tape, not the 15-minute children's tapes with all the bells and whistles designed to keep children occupied, but real books read in their entirety without sound effects. Most public libraries have shelves of books on tapes in the children's sections. Children can listen to and enjoy books that are far, far above their vocabulary level.

Read yourself. Turn off the TV, don't rent a movie; read a book, do a crossword puzzle, or buy the New York Times. Keep on reading together. Start to ask slightly more complex questions about the stories. "What was Wilbur afraid of, in Charlotte's Web? Why was Fern's mother worried when Fern told her that the animals were talking to her?".

By the age of 4, the average child should know her alphabet and the sounds that each letter makes. Continue to work on letter names and sounds; Jessie suggests lower-case magnetic refrigerator letters as one good way to continually work on letter skills. You can give the child a d magnet and say "d, d, d, dog"; you can say, "Mary, go get me the letter that says "t, t, t," and Mary will go over to the refrigerator and decide which letter makes that sound.

Sometime around age four or five, most children are ready to start reading. Sit down with a simple primer that teaches phonics (the sounds that letters make when they're combined together into words). The first lessons teach the vowel sounds a, e, i, o, and u; since the child probably already knows these sounds, she'll feel like he's starting to read already. Continue with putting the short vowel sounds together with consonants such as s (sa, se, si, so, su). We've found that young children enjoy reading these nonsense syllables! By the next lesson, the child is reading easy 3-letter words such as Dan and Bun. Continue systematically through the primer. Go slowly, with plenty of repetition; reread the lessons until your child is completely comfortably with the sounds and their combination into words. Do this for five minutes to start with; work up to ten or fifteen minutes per session.

At some other time during the day, sit down with the child and a real book and let her read it. At the end of this chapter, you'll find a list of books that can be read with relative ease, even by a child who's only learned consonants and one or two vowel sounds. Don't forget: You've already done your drill. Give the child a good chance to sound words out, but if she gets stuck, sound it out for him and move on. If you get to a word that uses a rule he hasn't used yet, simply tell him what the rule is and keep going. Example:

Child: "Ann went to the steps and went -- " (sticks on the word "down").

You: "That says 'down.' O and w together say 'ow.' D-ow-n."

Child: " -- down."

If you don't know the rule yourself, tell the child the word and move on. (And look it up later.)


Certain words need to be taught as "sight words" because, even though they are unphonetic or follow advanced phonetic rules, they appear with great regularity in the easiest of books. Put the, she, he, a, I, of, to, was, and you on flashcards and drill them; most children pick these up very quickly. You may find that a few other unphonetic words (would, there) pop up often enough to add to your list.

Start with five minutes of drill and five minutes of reading in an easy book, every day. Work up to fifteen minutes of each. Don't ask, "Do you want to do your reading now?"(They always say no). Plan it as matter-of-factly as you would plan teeth-brushing and bed-making. You'll be astounded at the speed with which children begin to sound out words on their own.

The advantage to this method is that you're not limited in what you read with the child; if the parent sounds out words which are beyond the child's "drill level," the two of you can read practically anything in the "easy reading" or "beginning reader" section of the library together. And you'll often find that your child has already absorbed a rule by the time you get to it in the primer. If you say enough times, while reading, "The e on the end makes the a say its name --that's the difference between hat and hate," your little reader will greet that rule when you arrive at it with a shrug: "I already knew that." And that's it. Remember: Reading is easy. Reading is easy. Reading is easy.

Don't you need flashcards, songs, drills, exercises, workbooks, and charts? We don't think so, for several reasons. In the first place, lots of people who are teaching a 4 or 5-year-old to read have a toddler, or a newborn. (Susan had both, when her oldest son was 5). Sorting through charts and songs and trying to follow a program with lots of aids is simply more complicated than it needs to be. With this method, all you need is a primer and lots of books. Second, all those reinforcement and aids create extra mental steps for the learner. If you're teaching a child to sing a song about, "A is for apple, b is for bear..." you're teaching the child to see an a, think "apple," and then think the sound of short a. If you have a flashcard that says "b" with a picture of a bird on it, the picture -- not the letter -- becomes a signal to the child to say the "b" sound. The child goes through an extra step in associating the sound with the letter. Instead of looking at a b and forming the "b" sound, the mental process becomes, "B...bird...b." This is slow, and in many cases the child stays slow because she becomes dependent on the clue. Without the clue, the child has no idea how to "break" the code of the word. There's an easier way. Just point to the a and say "a, a, a" (that's the short a sound as in at); point to the b and say "b, b, b." Even 2 and 3-year-olds love this game, and they learn these associations much faster than you might expect. Third, most reinforcements -- even though they may be advertised and produced for a home education setting -- were originally designed for a classroom of children. A teacher teaching a whole group of students to read can't sit down with each one, and teach each child to say the correct sound of each letter whenever he sees it on the page. That's an intensive, one on one process. She has to resort to the second-best method (reinforcing the correct sound through secondary aids in a non-reading context). You don't have to do that. Fourth, you're not teaching your 4 or 5-year-old the exhaustive elements of the language. Beginning in first grade, your child will receive a more thorough grounding in the rules of spelling -- which are simply phonics rules applied to writing.

During the K-4 and K-5 years, your goal is simply to get the child reading as quickly and fluently as possible. A kindergartener doesn't need to be able to list from memory all the different ways a long-e sound can be spelled; she just needs to be able to pronounce meal, field and teeth when he sees them.

What if my child isn't ready to read? If you've read to your preschooler since she could stare at a page, you can start this process at age 4 and take a couple of years to go through it. Or you can start at age 5 and do it in less time. Second and third children, who've watched older brothers and sisters learn to read, are likely to want to start sooner. If your 4-year-old asks you for a reading lesson, oblige her. I taught Susan to read at three, because every time I sat down with her 5-year-old brother to do a phonics lesson, she wanted to be included.

Reading readiness (like everything else in this chapter) isn't complicated. A child is ready to learn to read when she collects her stuffed animals and a picture book and tells them a story; or when she picks up a book and sits on the sofa and pretends she's reading to you; or when she constantly asks you "What does this say?" All of these activities show that she understands the whole concept of print words carrying a message.

Most 5-year olds are perfectly capable of learning to read, which doesn't mean that they'll want to do it. A child who squirms, complains, and protests every time you produce the primer isn't demonstrating "reading unreadiness." She's simply being five. It's a rare child who wants to do something unfamiliar which involves work, and we haven't yet met a 5-year-old who could be convinced to set her eyes on long range goals. If the child doesn't want to learn to read, tell her that you're going to do 5 minutes per day anyway. 5 minutes per day of a difficult task will not warp any child's mental state.

The beginning stage (when you're teaching the child to sound out 3-letter-words for the very first time) is the most difficult. Most children will swell up with pride over being able to read a Whole Book All Alone. Once they've started putting sentences together, they'll tell you they don't need to do the drill anymore; they just want to read. That's a good sign, but insist on the ten minutes of drill every day until you've covered all the pages. But use common sense. If you've started on 3-letter words, done a faithful 10 minutes per day for 3 or 4 weeks and the child shows absolutely no comprehension, he hasn't made the connection between print and sounds yet. Drop it for a month or two and then come back to it.

Writing

Many of the phonics programs we examined insist that you combine writing with reading. In other words, teach the child the consonants and the sound of a, but don't go on to the next step until the child is able to both read AND write sat, cat, fat, bat from dictation. We think this tends to frustrate very young readers. Remember, you want the child to read quickly, easily, and early. Many children are ready to read long before they have the muscular coordination to write. Why delay reading until the muscles of the hand and eye catch up? So do your reading and writing drills separately during the 4 and 5-year-old years.

Whenever the child is able to comfortably hold the pencil and has some control over it, move on to formal writing instruction. Get your little one a beginning writing tablet that has large-ruled lines and patterns for forming each letter (see end of chapter for ordering information). Teach one letter (always do capital and small letters together) or number at a time until you've gone through the entire alphabet and the numbers 1-100. You can either follow the letter sequence in the handwriting tablets we suggest. The writing tablets have arrows and numbers to show the exact way that letters should be written (the circle for a small a, for example, is always drawn counter-clockwise; the straight edge of a capital D is always drawn first, with the curve of the letter drawn second.) This is important! Make sure you teach the child to write the letter properly, and for the first few months, supervise her carefully so that she doesn't fall into bad habits.

In traditional ball-and-stick writing, the student continually lifts his hand -- if she writes a small d, for example, he draws a circle, picks up his pencil, and then connects a line to the circle. In continuous-stroke alphabet, the letter is written in one motion. This simplifies writing and makes for an easier transition into cursive. Start with the kindergarten level book, and let the child progress forward at his own rate. The books don't give a lot of practice space, so you'll want to order some extra paper (information at the end of the chapter).

When you've worked through the entire alphabet, let the child begin to copy words that you write out for her: family names are a good place to start. Eventually, ask her to copy very short sentences like: I love you, Ben is smart, Do you like to write? In this way, the 5-year-old not only practices writing, but begins to learn the conventions of written language (capitals for names and the beginnings of sentences, spaces between words, periods and exclamation points.)

In first and second grade, you'll progress to dictation, where the child writes without a model in front of her. But for now, write out the sentences for her to copy and let her refer to your models as often as needed. 10 minutes per day, 3-5 times per week, is sufficient. Frequency and consistency bring quicker results than prolonged sessions.

A word about cursive writing: A great debate is on about when to introduce cursive penmanship. Some educators say that children should begin with cursive and skip manuscript printing; others recommend beginning cursive anywhere between first and fourth grade. We have always chosen to teach printing until the child is writing quickly and well, and then begin cursive penmanship (usually in the middle of second grade.) This seems easier for most children.

Math

Now that the child can count, continue to do "daily" math by adding and subtracting in the context of everyday family life. Setting the table is a great math exercise. Ask your child to figure out how many plates, knives, forks and spoons are necessary. Add and subtract in the grocery store. Example:

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"Look, Mike, I'm picking up four tomatoes and then one more tomato, that makes five!)."
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Cook together . Recipes are full of fractions and measures. When you cut a sandwich in halves or quarters, say "Look! I cut this in half!" or "I cut this into fourths!"
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Play games that use numbers. Uno is a classic -- it teaches both number and color matching. Simple card games such as Battle and Go Fish require children to remember which numbers are higher and which are lower.
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Do lots of addition and subtraction with manipulatives (beans, buttons, pencils, chocolate chips), and practice counting to 100, counting by twos, fives, and tens, understanding money, telling time, and naming geometric figures (circles, squares, triangles, rectangles). Learn to write the numbers (but don't expect the written numbers to mean very much to the child at this point).

Your public library should have a colorful selection of kindergarten (level math books) easy problems worked out with photographed objects. Get a book every week and read through it with your child. If you do this, your child will be perfectly ready for first-grade math.

As in reading, though, younger children may enjoy having a math program to work on along with an older brother or sister. Again, think of a kindergarten math program as a game, not as an academic pursuit. If the child gets tired after five or ten minutes, don't force her to finish the lesson.