America celebrates July 4th as the birth of the nation’s independence, commemorating the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress declared the 13 colonies’ political separation from Great Britain.
Those early patriots cruelly toasted a kind of freedom while millions remained in bondage–enslaved and brutally colonized on North American soil for nearly 90 more years. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution didn’t officially end slavery in the United States until 1865, and full rights of citizenship for black people remain contested to this day.
And as I noted in Reading for Our Lives, mass literacy was so threatening to enslavers that they routinely met black people’s attempts at reading with anti-literacy statutes, whippings, amputations, and even murder.
Cutting the finger of the offending reader down to the first joint was common. Mississippi law made corporal punishment “not exceeding thirty-nine lashes” the price to be paid by groups of black people—enslaved or free—who dared assemble to learn reading or writing. South Carolina created stiffer and stiffer anti-literacy statutes between 1740 and 1834, eventually punishing black readers with up to 50 lashes. And even in states like Maryland where the law didn’t prohibit such teaching, custom often did.
Historian Heather Andrea Williams explains how denying literacy was meant to deny enslaved people’s very humanity and prolong their captivity. “Reading indicated to the world that this so-called property had a mind, and writing foretold the ability to construct an alternative narrative about bondage itself,” she writes. “Literacy among slaves would expose slavery, and masters knew it.”
So amid the rush of fireworks, pageantry, and barbecue, my husband and I always pause to consider the boundaries of the freedoms our nation extols: Whose rights are granted, protected, and expanded, and whose are not.
Of course, there’s reading involved. We reread and discuss Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, every year. It’s a brilliant oratory from perhaps the greatest American and it offers a timely reminder not to allow myth to obscure truth or celebration of progress to minimize the urgent need for more.
When called to speak at a Fourth of July celebration in 1852, the former slave and famed abolitionist asked if the invitation was meant to mock him with its hypocrisy. What, from the perspective of those held in bondage, could Independence Day possibly mean?
Douglass answered: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
And this, I think, is what we’re reading for. To better understand the history that’s led us here. To abandon illusions. To commit to progress. To right wrongs. To liberate through literacy. And Douglass’s own story illustrates powerfully just how well literacy paves the path to liberation. His road to reading started out forthrightly enough, when his enslaver’s wife taught him the alphabet and a few short words.
But this early instruction was cruelly cut short by a lesson his teacher received: that literacy and slavery were incompatible. In an autobiography, Douglass recalls his enslaver warning his wife, “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do . . . Now, if you teach that nigger (speaking of [Douglass]) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Douglass heard his enslaver’s tirade for what it was—a clear admission that literacy was no less than “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Thus motivated, he set out to learn to read “with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble.”
He mastered the letters S, L, F, and A from the scribblings of Baltimore shipyard carpenters who marked timber placements starboard or larboard side and forward or aft. He plied poor Irish immigrant boys with bread to get them to teach him the letters they knew. Then Douglass snuck away to scrawl the treasured letters with a lump of chalk on a board fence, brick wall, or pavement, and copied them in the spaces left in a white child’s old Webster’s Spelling Book until he knew them cold.
Literacy, starting with the recognition and naming of 26 letters, offered the enslaved a measure of mobility, privacy, and liberty that was as precious as life itself. Thousands of enslaved men, women, and children ventured this dangerous, covert pursuit of the alphabet and the powerful words it made by any means they could, and an estimated 5% succeeded in learning to read by 1860.
Perhaps thousands more perished trying. Enoch Golden, a black reader and teacher, is said to have mused on his deathbed that he had “been de death o’ many a nigger ’cause he taught so many to read and write.”
Your child’s journey won’t be this perilous. But make no mistake, literacy today is no less powerful a means of resistance and liberation. And there are still considerable obstacles to its attainment, especially for children who are poor or black.
Want to support my work to foster liberation through literacy? Here are 10 Ways to Help Me Promote Literacy for All.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hail from Akron, Ohio, a city most famous (depending on who you ask) for being the former rubber capital of the world, the birthplace of LeBron James, or the site of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851. But not until Zaila Avant-garde, a black girl from Harvey, Louisiana, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2021 did I hear of another of my hometown’s claims to fame: Akronite MacNolia Cox was the first black student to make it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee—in 1936.
Today the Scripps National Spelling Bee is among the most diverse academic competitions around, but in Cox’s day vicious segregation marred her ascent to the national stage. Poet A. Van Jordan, another Akron native, excavated Cox’s incredible story by obtaining information at the city’s Department of Vital Statistics and snippets from Cox’s mother’s diary, which had been preserved by a family member. Cox had to ride in segregated train cars, take back stairs, enter banquets through the kitchen, and stay at the home of a black surgeon in D.C. because the Willard Hotel where the other spellers stayed wouldn’t welcome her.
Cox spelled flawlessly in round after round of the national competition. Meanwhile her white competitors misspelled words and were allowed to remain in the competition due to technicalities. When she looked destined to win, spelling bee officials gave her a word that wasn’t on the approved list: Nemesis, the name of the Greek goddess of divine retribution and revenge, a proper noun and, by the competition’s own laws at the time, verboten. She spelled it incorrectly and was knocked out of the competition. She went home to Ohio, where scholarships she’d been promised never materialized, and she died of cancer, a domestic, at age 53.
Jordan’s poetic retelling of her story, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, published in 2006, tells Cox’s life story in reverse from her deathbed to the night before the historic spelling bee, the moment of her highest potential. In an article, “The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee,” historian Cynthia Greenlee captures the larger significance of the story: “historically, African-Americans have understood the spelling bee as a contested racial space, where mastering a word list was a feat of skill, motivation, and racial resistance through direct competition with one’s ‘social betters,’” she writes. “If black spellers weren’t actually sparring with white rivals, each word memorized—the letters, language of origin, possible meanings—was another symbolic brick building a black community hungry for the book-learning denied to them in slavery and segregation.”
Much of the media coverage of Avant-garde’s victory noted contemporary injustices that result in few black competitive spellers—expensive travel costs and competition fees, lack of sponsorships, and the fact that schools with many black children have fewer resources to support and train students. And it’s true that coaches like the fictional English professor Dr. Larabee in the movie Akeelah and the Bee are scarce and pricey. Many former Scripps Bee winners and finalists charge more than $100/hour to groom the next generation of competitors.
But the inequity is deeper and longer standing than mere access to a spelling bee. And Avant-garde, a homeschooled phenom and three-time Guinness World Record holder for basketball dribbling, is the kind of exception that accentuates the rule. She had to be extraordinary in so many ways to win her national title. The average child in America today—black or white—lacks access to spelling instruction itself, let alone opportunity for in-depth study of letter patterns, language nuances, and word meanings.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives
On the night my dad died, I walked to his bedside to show him a black-and-white sonogram, glossy and blurred. It may have been the first time I ever approached him while he was lying down. In my memories, he was always up—reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, laboring over files in his office, watching some dark TV drama. I remember the picture feeling light and flimsy in the enormity of the moment, a father on his deathbed hearing his only child tell of the life she carried.
He took in the sound waves rendered in print, smiled, and whispered, I think it’s a boy, but I hope it’s a girl. He got his wish, but I never got to ask him what he meant by it. He passed within hours of his quiet declaration and left me to puzzle over the spaces between a parent’s dreams and a child’s promise, between presence and absence, between birth and legacy.
When our baby girl was born months later, my husband and I named her after Zora Neale Hurston to foretell a wise, bold, and colorful life. Like my parents did when they named me after Maya Angelou, we set the intention of resilience, fortitude, and distinction upon her young shoulders. We vowed to help our Zora experience the fullness of her inheritance—to discover herself powerful, unique, and inseparable from all the life that pulses everywhere. Or as her namesake put it, to know that each of us is “the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
I made reading—the miracle of connecting with others across space and time—a pillar of my mothering. In our first days at home, the intimacy of sharing stories and books became a touchstone. I recited lines from Jabari Asim’s Girl of Mine from dawn till dusk. Hello, howdy do, little princess honeydew. Giggly, wiggly precious pearl. I’m so glad that you’re my girl. That little board book held my dreams for my daughter, held my awe of her existence. Reading it over and over felt like love and life support for a sleep-deprived mom. Soon I’d memorized the text, turning the pages only for show as I kept on rocking, reading, feeding her.
As a new mom who’d just lost a parent, I was comforted by the story’s easy rhythms and my own belief in the power of a parent’s words in a child’s ear. Knowing firsthand how words nourish, I wanted to feed her page upon page, give her tastes of poetry, let her sip prose. I felt the book’s upbeat refrain bolster something precious and fragile in her—and in me. Reading to her was love, care, and a pathway to a family ethos that I treasured. Toni Morrison said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Stories were our first, most cherished language. I threw myself into the quest to raise a reader with all the zeal of new motherhood and the passion of someone who has lived the written word’s power to both uplift and inspire. Soon, though, I was ready to expand my repertoire of literacy-promoting activities. But what to add? The advice in the books on my shelf, and in the articles I consumed voraciously, seemed to start and stop with storytime.
I put Zora in a Montessori toddler program for some professional backup. There she gained other valuable skills through baby-doll washing and moving pompoms from one dish to another with tongs. Her fine motor skills, potty training, and home tidying abilities blossomed, but I remained unsure about her reading development. Were the verbal experiences, social interactions, and classroom read-alouds enough? Was I doing my part at home?
The knowledge that parents need about reading development and instruction is not easy to come by. The United States invests little in children in their first few years of life, when the brain is at its most flexible to build a foundation for learning, social engagement, and health.
There’s no mass early-literacy boot camp for parents; valuable research is locked behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public; and too few experts communicate their findings in clear, understandable, and practical terms. Most librarians and booksellers are pros at helping you locate what they’ve stocked, but less so at explaining how to facilitate language and literacy learning at different ages and stages.
I remember wandering the aisles of bookstores selecting the “best,” most beautiful picture books for my newborn. I knew she couldn’t lift her head or even see well yet. But I didn’t know that a photo of a human face or a bold pattern would catch her attention more than the lush illustrations of a Caldecott Medal winner. And while I knew to talk to my baby, I didn’t get that it was a two-way street from day one, that her coos and babbles were as significant as the words I spoke.
In short, I made every mistake in the book—if there had been such a book. Oh, how I wished there were a book (maybe with a title like What to Deliver After You’ve Delivered), preferably with a job description, manual of procedures, and performance metrics. But like so much of parenting, no clear instructions came with the position.
So I went back to school myself, enrolling in a graduate course at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia to get the literacy lowdown. I learned that there was more—much more—that I could do to unlock long-term reading and educational success for Zora. I also discovered that what I’d thought was personal ignorance (I didn’t know how to teach reading) was actually a national crisis.
Parents were far from the only ones missing a clear sense of how reading skills develop and the knowledge needed to nurture them. Teachers, pediatricians, and educational policy makers often lacked this critical insight as well. Most classmates in the Foundations of Reading Instruction course were teachers, and while they knew more than me, they had much to learn, too.
I quickly discovered that being a strong reader in no way prepares you to teach reading. In fact, many fluent readers aren’t consciously aware of the underlying structure of language and print that good teaching must make explicit for children. In order to help kids, parents—and certainly teachers—need to learn to attend to and describe features of written language that expert readers no longer notice or focus on.
The contrast between (on the one hand) abysmal reading performance and (on the other) superficial advice doled out to parents about how to raise readers rankled. Surely the parents who shape a child’s reading prospects for years before the child enters school should be better informed.
Without any mom-in-the-trenches guidance, I set out to document what I learned about how reading works, how parents can foster it, and what we can (and can’t) expect from instruction in schools. I scoured academic literature, reading curricula, state learning standards, government reports, and more. I talked to teachers, tutors, and parents in the thick of raising readers. I served on school, library, and literacy nonprofit boards; volunteered in early-learning programs; and developed databases of research and instructional techniques. I also called top researchers to ask what specific advice they would offer parents today.
My personal effort to better understand what it takes to raise a reader tipped into a larger mission to help all parents learn what’s needed to do this vital work.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives There’s no magic curriculum to fix the nation’s reading crisis, but there is a powerful preventative measure that can get to the root of the problem: intentional, everyday literacy-building one child at a time. Too many parents overestimate what schools can do and underestimate the power of family habits. Reading for Our Lives offers practical, evidence-based tips to help parents take charge and launch kids’ learning. From the revised, updated paperback edition, here are five doable and impactful ideas:
- Set up your physical environment to remind you to nurture literacy. It’s easy for reading to fall by the wayside during busy days with young children, so set up your home to provide timely reminders. And even if reading becomes a daily habit, other key literacy-building activities can slip through the cracks—like teaching letters or playing with rhymes or alliteration. Hang a nursery rhyme mobile over the changing table, post an alphabet chart on the wall, put waterproof books by the bathtub, or stock conversation cards on the dinner table. Find your way to keep letters, language, and reading top of mind so you can nurture language and literacy at every turn.
- Use wordplay to raise your kids’ awareness of specific speech sounds. When kids struggle to hear and distinguish the individual sounds that make up words, they struggle with reading and spelling. The good news? Building this critical skill, called phonological awareness, doesn’t have to feel like schoolwork. You can make it playful and on-the-go! Sing songs like “The Name Game,” play I Spy with rhyming words, or even speak in pig Latin. Nursery rhymes help kids tune into syllables and sounds, and games like syllable-clapping and rhyming can be worked into everyday activities. As kids grow, amp up the challenge by blending or switching sounds in words as a game. Just remember to keep it light and fun.
- Help your child learn letter shapes, in addition to letter names and sounds. Kids don’t naturally distinguish between letters, numbers, and drawings—it takes time and practice. Start by pointing out letters in storybooks or daily life. Trace them with your finger and tell your child their names to build recognition. The research is clear: how you talk about letters matters. Describe the curves, lines, humps, and dots that form each letter, and you’ll get them well prepared for reading.. For example, you could point to a T, trace it with your finger, and say, This is the letter T. It has two lines, a long one that goes down, and a shorter one that goes across. The letter T says /t/.
- Boost your child’s language skills with Smart’s TALK Method. Verbal communication skills directly impact kids’ early learning and predict their school achievement down the road. The TALK Method—TAKE TURNS, ASK QUESTIONS, LABEL AND POINT, and KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING—can supercharge your child’s language and social skills. Take turns in conversation with little ones to build their vocabulary, comprehension, and overall preparation for reading. Ask simple questions about what you see around you (What’s that? Do you see the bird?) to draw them out, label (verbally—aka name) and point to objects to build their vocabulary (That’s an umbrella!), and keep the conversation going by connecting the moment to a story or experience (It’s raining here, just like in the picture!).
- Anchor literacy-building habits to your everyday moments. It’s easier to start doing something new (or more consistently) when you tie it to your existing routine. Reading for Our Lives walks you through a step-by-step process to create simple, effective conversation habits that build your little one’s brain connections and vocabulary. For example: After I hear my baby coo or babble, I will respond in a complete sentence. After I put breakfast on the table, I will point to and name the foods I’m serving up. Plus, the process works for any literacy-building habit parents want to establish, from wordplay and letter teaching to book discussion and spelling practice.
With these simple, everyday strategies, you can unlock your child’s potential and build the foundation for a lifetime of reading success!
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?
Audre Lorde
Some time ago, I read an unusual report from the Canterbury region of New Zealand. It told, in the subdued tone of an academic journal article, the story of an urgent rescue mission. On September 4, 2010, a massive earthquake rocked the city of Christchurch (population: 350,000). The seismic event measured 7.1 in magnitude. It tripped circuit breakers at substations and knocked out power. Building facades collapsed, crushed cars, and jammed roads.
And that was just the warmup. For the next year and a half, the devastation continued, with ten thousand aftershocks and three more full-blown earthquakes. A violent quake in February of the following year killed 185 people and leveled the central business district.
But the report that caught my attention wasn’t about the first responders who rushed in to tend to the injured, restore power, provide water, and reopen transport. It wasn’t about the elaborate emergency-management structures that launched within hours. It was about an unheralded cadre working to address another type of fallout from the earthquakes, one a lot less visible than liquefied soil sending buried pipes floating to the surface.
The rescuers I read about were psychologists, health advisors, and educators, all collaborating to pilot a program aimed at preventing a crisis they foresaw for children affected by the earthquakes. They knew that life in extreme instability, whether wrought by war or famine or natural disaster, breeds developmental difficulties and reinforces inequities, with lasting consequences.
They had seen data, collected 6,000 miles away in Santiago, Chile, that suggested that an earthquake can create educational aftershocks, too. Preschool kids who took early-language and early-literacy assessments shortly after the earthquake performed worse on letter-word identification and text comprehension than comparable kids who took the same assessments one year before the earthquake.
The study provided evidence that their performance had been hurt by their parents’ disaster-wrought stress and their own. Plus, school-entry data back in New Zealand revealed that many kids living in earthquake-affected communities struggled with expressive language and awareness of sound structure in words.
The researchers who ran the pilot program summed up the nature of the challenge with characteristic understatement: “These results suggest that such experiences may impact families, with potential developmental sequelae for children.”
But before vulnerable kids’ development can be protected and bolstered, parents, teachers, and other concerned parties must notice the learning crises, which aren’t glaring like abandoned buildings with missing windows and walls. Next, we have to sustain interest and intentional action through a yearslong recovery, without the benefit of construction clamor to herald our progress.
The fact is, on any given day in any given community—natural disaster or not—there are learning crises brewing. There are children who aren’t getting the language they need, due to household disorder and chaos, parent disposition, and a range of other circumstances.
And although poverty creates the kind of stress and instability that lessen child-focused conversation and responsiveness in homes, many well-educated and advantaged families struggle with talk, too, for any number of reasons.
Across demographics, differences in language skills are associated with differences in healthcare outcomes, high school graduation rates, job placement results, earning levels, and more.
The central truth every parent must grasp is this: oral-language skills are required for reading. Just as kids crawl before they walk, they talk before they read. And before they talk, babies listen, grunt, and coo. We must facilitate and encourage it all.
Psychologists Anne E. Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky describe the delayed strong influence of early oral-language skills and reading development as a kind of “sleeper effect.”
The importance of early oral-language skills should not be underestimated, they say, because “no matter how accurately a middle school student can sound out new and difficult words like omniscient or prejudice, his ability to understand these words in context will depend on how often he has talked about these words and the concepts related to them. Each new word that a child acquires verbally becomes a word that he will eventually be able to recognize and make sense of when he sees it in print, so early vocabulary development is an essential skill for later reading success.”
Language and learning processes are overlapping and interrelated. They are like one of those elaborate domino creations that garner millions of views on YouTube. A creator devotes weeks to meticulously placing domino after domino into an elaborate design, just to engineer a few minutes of excitement when the first block sets off a chain reaction that topples thousands more. Some tumble in a straight line. Others, placed at a slight angle, bend the pattern into curves and turns. Still others are positioned to hit two dominos at once, sending branches of the design off in different directions.
Early parent talk is the first domino. It pings (through years of back-and-forth conversation) straight into an infant’s grunts, coos, babbles, and eventually words. At the same time, those early conversations knock down other dominos and create a new branch at the split that builds momentum toward a toddler’s vocabulary, which affects school readiness, which predicts third-grade reading, which correlates with high school graduation rates, and so on.
The influence that frequent, quality parent talk has on eventual literacy is so strong and begins so early in life that many experts now rank it above the once be-all, end-all practice of reading aloud. In fact, some argue that talking with your child from infancy may be “the single strongest action you can take to increase your child’s educational opportunities.”
Words matter. Timing matters. You matter.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives In the 1960s, listeners from Los Angeles to London were charmed by Shirley Ellis and her catchy tunes. Archival footage shows her poised in dazzling gowns cinched at the waist just so, the vigor and verve of her vocals holding audiences rapt.
The Congress Records songstress had a single on the Billboard Hot Rhythm and Blues Top 10 list in January 1965, alongside the Temptations’ “My Girl,” Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” the Supremes’ “Come See about Me,” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Going to Come.” Her hit still resounds, although Ellis is too often regarded as an American music history footnote, not a legend like those contemporaries.
The song, inspired by a rhyming game she played as a child, has stayed in rotation through the years in television, movies, commercials, and cover versions. Runway models walked to its rhythms in a Stella McCartney fashion show to rave reviews from Women’s Wear Daily the same year that a major retailer’s commercial featured a family singing it on a road trip. Howard Stern says singing the ditty’s his “schtick with kids.” Academy Award winner Jessica Lange performed a show-stopping rendition on American Horror Story that catapulted the oldie-but-goodie to meme status on TikTok. And the song’s title continues to be invoked as a tortured metaphor for trade articles about everything from corporate rebranding efforts to the merits of monogramming.
Yes, “The Name Game” endures. Odds are you know the tune. Something in its rhythm and rules—remove the first consonant of a name; replace it with a B, F, or M; then add a bo, fo, fee, fi, or mo in the designated spots—keeps the song humming along. Despite prognostications that it was a “novelty tune” destined to disappear when the freshness of its nonsensical humor wore off, it lives on. The inventive wordplay and nods to the hand-clapping, jump-roping culture of black girlhood also won Ellis credit for ushering in a new form of American music. Her picture is the image in an encyclopedia entry documenting “proto-rap,” the pre-1980s stylistic forebear to hip-hop’s beats, rhymes, and banter. I’d argue that she’s also a standard bearer for another movement that she scarcely could have anticipated—early support for phonological awareness.
What Is Phonological Awareness?
Phonological awareness is the conscious ability to recognize and manipulate sound segments within words, and it’s right up there with oral language and letter knowledge as a pillar of literacy. It’s critical to understand that spoken words can be divided into smaller sounds in order to read in alphabetic writing systems like English. Letters exist to represent, in writing, the sequences of sounds that we hear in speech. When kids struggle with reading, an underlying and overlooked cause can be that they have difficulty processing speech sounds. Yet most parents don’t think to devote time to bolstering kids’ sensitivity to the sounds in words.
To do our part, parents need to begin paying attention to how words can be sliced and diced into different sound units, such as syllables and less-familiar units like—stay with me here—onsets, rimes, and phonemes. Syllables are pronunciation units that include a vowel sound and optional consonant sounds before and/or after the vowel. For example, the word soccer has two syllables and basketball has three. An onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster sound in a word—the /t/ sound in team, for example, or the /sp/ sound in spoon. Some words like air don’t have an onset. The rime unit (fraternal twin to rhyme), by contrast, is the vowel sound within a syllable plus any consonant sounds that follow the vowel. For example, the “eam” in team. Phonemes (e.g., /t/, /ē/, or /m/) are the smallest speech sound units in English—and there are forty-four.
If that sounds like a lot to learn and teach, you can take comfort in a couple of things. One, kids don’t need to know all these terms and details. You just need to help them perceive and manipulate the different sounds, which can happen through play. Second, kids’ awareness of sounds within words generally develops in a predictable sequence, from larger units like syllables to smaller and smaller ones. And within each size unit there’s a range of ways kids can manipulate the sounds, from rudimentary to complex. Plus, all of this development happens over the course of years, so you’ve got plenty of time to get up to speed on what skills to nurture now—and next.
In terms of order, children typically recognize that breakfast has two syllables before grasping that it starts with a /b/ sound or that it has eight sounds in all—/b/, /r/, /e/, /k/, /f/, /i/, /s/, and /t/. Their ability to blend, segment, and recombine sounds within words also develops with time and experience. Kids can usually compare and contrast words (e.g. notice that cup and pup rhyme) before they can come up with rhyming words themselves or name the sounds within words. And little ones typically can blend /c/ /u/ /p/ sounds to say cup before they can break down cup into its three sounds.
Think of these different phonological awareness activities (isolating, blending, segmenting, etc.) at the syllable, onset, rime, and phoneme levels as different presentations of the same fundamental ability. Knowing that these sound-analysis skills are all located along a single continuum will help you see how your child is progressing on the road to literacy, according to Jason Anthony, a professor at the University of South Florida who specializes in language and literacy acquisition. In general, children who do well at noticing, pondering, and manipulating sound units within words early on are going to continue to do well and learn to read without difficulty. “The reason it’s important to understand that all of these things fall under phonological awareness is that you can actually play with your child, do these sound activities, and encourage their literacy development long before they ever reach formal reading instruction,” he explains.
It also means that professionals can identify early which kids are likely to have more difficulty. “We don’t have to wait until third grade to decide, ‘This child is failing school, he can’t read,’” Anthony explains. “Now we’re in a much better place to identify a child at risk of reading failure at kindergarten entry or even preschool.”
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives For better or for worse, school experiences shape our ideas of what learning looks–and feels–like. But teaching your own children can happen in the course of everyday family activities and needn’t mimic the formality and distance of traditional classrooms with a parent at a whiteboard and the child behind a desk (or computer). Family learning should be much more organic and conversational than that. And when it comes to teaching the foundational but often-overlooked pre-reading skill of phonological awareness, it can definitely be fun and on the fly, too.
Phonological awareness is the conscious ability to recognize and manipulate sound segments within words, and it’s right up there with oral language and letter knowledge as a pillar of literacy. It’s critical to understand that spoken words can be divided into smaller sounds in order to read in alphabetic writing systems like English. Letters exist to represent, in writing, the sequences of sounds that we hear in speech. When kids struggle with reading, an underlying and overlooked cause can be that they have difficulty processing speech sounds. Yet most parents don’t think about spending time on kids’ phonological awareness.
The main way for parents to help kids develop phonological awareness is through play. It’s not drill and kill. It’s singing “The Name Game.” It’s talking in Pig Latin. It’s playing I Spy with beginning sounds or rhyming words instead of colors. (I spy something that rhymes with tike. Yes, the bike!)
When you recite nursery rhymes, you’re heightening kids’ sensitivity to the syllables and the beginning, middle, and ending sounds within words. The stress patterns of classics like “Jack and Jill Went up the Hill” help them learn about syllables and rhymes, important phonological awareness skills. And the alliteration in “Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers” accentuates the /p/ sound and distinguishes it from surrounding sounds, a finer-grained level of sensitivity to sounds.
You can easily build phonological awareness anytime, anywhere, with just your voice and your child’s attention. You don’t need a book (although they can help). You don’t need paper. You don’t need a table. You don’t even need to be still—neighborhood strolls or car, bus, or subway rides present lovely opportunities for this kind of banter. Just keep in mind their age and find a few go-to activities to incorporate into the things you’re already doing together. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Focus on syllable-blending (bat plus man equals batman) and syllable-clapping activities with 2- and 3-year-olds.
- How many syllables are in elevator? 3
- Put this word together: cup plus cake. Cupcake
- Say the syllables in elephant. E-le-phant
- What’s the word applesauce without apple? Sauce
For 3- and 4-year-olds, emphasize rhyming skills, along with blending and segmenting starting and ending sounds.
- Do cup and pup rhyme? Yes. Do cup and cake rhyme? No.
- Tell me some words that rhyme with win. Bin, kin, sin, thin
- Put this word together: c-at
- Divide sleep into two parts. Sl-eep
With 4-year-olds, dig into individual sounds as your child gets more familiar with the alphabet.
- Which words start with the same sound: bug, bowl, fish? Bug, bowl
- What’s the first sound in zoo? /z/
- What sound is the same in cow, cat, camel, kangaroo, and koala? /k/
By age 5 and 6, kids may initiate sound games on their own, by doing things like talking in Pig Latin to friends. Ooday ouyay ememberray atthay amegay?
- Which word starts with a different sound—bad, bat, rag, bag? Rag
- Put this word together: /y/ /e/ /s/. Yes!
- What sounds do you hear in the word bat? /b/, /a/, /t/
- What word do you get if you add /b/ to /r/ /a/ /g/. Brag
- The word is bug. Change the /b/ to /h/. What’s the new word? Hug
Next, typically after six years old, kids can get adept at blending, segmenting, deleting, adding, and substituting sounds in words. That’s when you can add phonological play like Spoonerisms into the mix. These are when you swap the starting sounds of two words (usually to comical effect). Sometimes they occur naturally in conversation when you accidentally say things like I “zipped the skoom meeting” instead of “I skipped the Zoom meeting.” But you can intentionally mix up initial sounds as a game, and get your little one in on the action. Just explain the game and give examples, like: Let’s mix up some sounds. Instead of saying, “It’s dinner time,” we can say, “It’s timmer dime” if we flip-flop the starting sounds. What happens if you swap the starting sounds in “Tootsie Roll”? Yes, that would be “rootsie toll”!
This is all meant to be wordplay, not an interrogation! Get excited and cheer together when your child solves the puzzle. If they struggle or don’t get it, laugh together. A great irony of raising readers is that the critically important, life-trajectory-altering, high-stakes work of building these foundational skills is best done with the lightest, nearly imperceptible touch. The subtler the accumulation of moments of speech, song, and play over the course of years, the better, experts agree.
As you nurture these skills, remember to keep things light, fun and encouraging. “If you’re trying to do exercise and it’s really tough and you’ve got a trainer or someone telling you you’re not getting it right, you just stop going,” Gillon from the University of Canterbury says. “And it’s the same with children. They like to do things that they’re getting lots of positive praise and encouragement for. If it’s fun, they’ll keep doing it.”Or, put another way, if it’s not fun, don’t do it.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives You take time to read to your little one regularly. You go to the library and browse the shelves hand in hand. You sing nursery rhymes and play with words. All wonderful, worthwhile activities. But what if I told you there’s one more lever you might want to pull to directly impact your child’s learning trajectory—and it’ll cost you?
Have you thought about the ways spending a little money might set your child up for success? Have you thought about the message your spending sends to kids about your priorities?
This excerpt from my book Reading for Our Lives offers a few ideas on how allocating some dollars toward reading might be a money move. I’m not saying that you have to spend toward this end. I just want you to know it’s an option so that you can make an intentional decision about whether you should or not.
Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.
James Frick
Money talks. Or, in this case, money can pay people to talk with, assess, read to, teach, and support your child. I’ve never seen spending listed in a magazine roundup of ways parents can boost reading achievement, but it is. I think it’s important to say so, plainly, to parents of young children, so that they understand it’s among their options when they can’t meet all their child’s learning needs on their own. And what parent can?
When my daughter was entering elementary school and I spoke with parents of older children about their school experiences, I was shocked by how commonplace tutoring was. One friend paid her son’s teacher to tutor him over the summer, to repeat reading lessons that hadn’t taken hold during the school year. Another took out a high- interest loan to cover out‑of‑school reading support with a national learning center.
The big supplementary educational spending wasn’t limited to my high-earning, high-achieving neighbors. In the decades since many of us were kids, there’s been a steady rise in tutoring for young children—even preschoolers. In fact, some observers date the first “explosion in demand” for preschool tutoring to 2002 and 2003. That means we’re entering a time when millennials who themselves were tutored as preschoolers are becoming parents.
Industry analysts expect preschool tutoring enrollment, which has grown over the last five years, to continue to boom at least through 2026 as disposable income rebounds from the pandemic. All this tells us that tutoring kids before elementary school is not new, it’s not limited to an overexuberant fringe of parents, and it’s not going anywhere soon.
Most often, today’s parents are spending on tutoring out of real concern for getting their kids ready for kindergarten or on “grade level” once they’re school-aged. Plus, cohorts of young children whose early childcare and education were affected by the COVID‑19 pandemic will need extra supports, tutoring or otherwise, over time as well.
Should parents have to pay to secure basic literacy skills for their kids? No. Do they? Often, yes. Private tutoring is a major, longstanding player in American education with implications for how, when, and whether kids fulfill their reading potential. But it’s not the only one.
Literacy spending may deserve a place among the priorities you weigh when budgeting your family’s resources, alongside saving, healthcare, vacations, and so on. Beyond tutoring, financial investment in learning evaluations, educational experiences, private schools, and high-quality childcare are all major factors driving better literacy outcomes for many. And don’t discount smaller, everyday purchases like books, field trips, and after-school activities. They also contribute to the richness of kids’ vocabulary, background knowledge, and enthusiasm for learning.
Many parents make up for what they lack in money with creativity in engineering the experiences and access their child needs, meticulously tracking free-admission days at local cultural institutions and borrowing or making supplies they can’t buy. Sometimes it comes down to choices like paying for a visit to a science museum versus a sports match, an enrichment class versus an amusement park. Conscious spending means recognizing the trade-offs we make every day and considering their impact.
I focus on free and inexpensive ways to nurture reading, and I’m a huge fan of the free books and programming that libraries provide. Still, it’s important to note that how parents deploy the money they have makes an impact: spending to provide more of the language, experiences, and instruction kids need is an option.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Oral-language skills are required for reading. Just as kids crawl before they walk, they talk before they read. And before they talk, babies listen, grunt, and coo. We must facilitate and encourage it all.
As language development expert Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and colleagues put it, “Language is causally implicated in most of what children learn in the first years of life. Indeed, kindergarten language scores, which are deeply rooted in the language development of infants and toddlers, are the single best predictor of school achievement in all subjects in third and fifth grade.”
Psychologists Anne E. Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky describe the delayed strong influence of early oral-language skills and reading development as a kind of “sleeper effect.” The importance of early oral-language skills should not be underestimated, they say, because “no matter how accurately a middle school student can sound out new and difficult words like omniscient or prejudice, his ability to understand these words in context will depend on how often he has talked about these words and the concepts related to them. Each new word that a child acquires verbally becomes a word that he will eventually be able to recognize and make sense of when he sees it in print, so early vocabulary development is an essential skill for later reading success.”
The influence that frequent, quality parent talk has on eventual literacy is so strong and begins so early in life that many experts now rank it above the once be-all, end-all practice of reading aloud. In fact, some argue that talking with your child from infancy may be “the single strongest action you can take to increase your child’s educational opportunities.” Language learning starts early—in utero, by about 35 weeks gestation—and the formation of synapses involved in language learning peaks during the first 6 months after birth. Researchers in one study found evidence that the richness of a child’s early-language environment predicts their vocabulary, their language and speech processing, and fourth-grade literacy outcomes better than their mothers’ education level or family welfare status.
Words matter. Timing matters. You matter.
Language Nutrition Defined
We talk to our kids for all kinds of reasons in the moment—to soothe, to encourage, to entertain, to direct. And there’s power in every word we speak, including the impromptu conversations we have while giving baths, making meals, and playing at home. But sometimes we go above and beyond, delivering a kind of fortified talk that’s extra nourishing to their long-term brain, language, and social development.
Some early-language advocates call this “language nutrition” to emphasize just how vital it is.
Try This at Home: Learn to TALK
Oral-language experience is critical for reading development, but making nourishing conversation with babies and young children comes more naturally to some parents than others. So I created the TALK Method to help even the quietest parents find something to say while reading or spending time with kids. The next time you’re with your child, challenge yourself to:
- TAKE TURNS. Even preverbal infants can be dynamic conversational partners, if you let them. Pause to listen for their coos and babbles and to observe their eye movements or facial expressions. When you notice their gaze and utterances, conversation gets much easier because you’re responding to their prompts versus initiating talk all on your own. Acknowledge the interests and attention the child shows: Yes, I hear you. I think the dog is pretty silly, too. Your reply fuels early brain development.
- ASK QUESTIONS. Want to give babies a language boost, even before they start talking? Try asking questions about a scene unfolding in real life or within the pages of a book you’re reading, like What’s that? Do you see the bird? or just Ready to turn the page? A study found that the number of questions moms asked during shared book reading with 10- month-old infants predicted language skills 8 months later.
- LABEL AND POINT. There’s plenty to be said for describing your surroundings or what’s on a book page, as well. Pointing to everyday objects or book illustrations and talking about their colors and shapes, or discussing related action, is conversation, too. And the finger- topage or finger- to- object connection helps bring the baby’s attention in line with yours. For example, you could say, There’s the umbrella. Right there. (Pointing.)
- KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING. Look for opportunities to extend, expand, and elaborate on whatever you’re talking about. For example, while reading you could bring book content into the realm of everyday life and experience by linking characters and plot to things the child has experienced. Saying something like the following builds on the book without veering too far off topic: Look! It’s raining in the picture. We saw rain outside our window, too.
Yes, you can have a conversation with an infant who’s not yet talking, and you can keep using these same prompts as they age. Taking turns, asking questions, highlighting interesting things, and discussing books never get old. Sooner than you think, your baby will turn into a toddler who points and labels on their own, and then a preschooler who discusses and shares their reactions with you, having learned from your fine example. Trust me, all of this gets easier with time, practice, and attention. One day, it’ll feel second nature.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Are you looking for ways to motivate your child to read more? If so, you’re not alone. Many parents want to encourage their small child to listen to more read-alouds or try new books. And many more struggle to get their kids to read independently or pick up a book more often.
There are many ways to foster book love and get kids to read more—like making reading a central part of a loving relationship with you, choosing books they’ll love, and limiting the distractions of screen time.
But sometimes all the pieces are in place, and they still need a little nudge to get started, to get over a hump, or to choose reading over other options. In this case, reading incentives can be just the ticket to motivate a child to turn to books more, building up the reading habit.
That’s where reading bingo comes in handy. It’s a fun and playful way to encourage more book time.
Why Reading Bingo is a Great Reading Incentive
A powerful way to incentivize kids to do anything is to turn it into a game. Finding playful ways to encourage positive behaviors pays off two-fold: in the behavior and in strengthening your parent-child relationship.
After all, kids love games and they love challenges—challenges they can conquer, that is. This playful challenge is the power of reading bingo for kids.
Of course, you can also throw in a little additional incentive in the form of simple rewards for completing the bingo challenge if needed. We’ll get into tips on good rewards to use (Hint: no iPads!) later in this post.
But first, let’s look at how to get started playing reading bingo.
How to Play Reading Bingo
To play reading bingo, all you need is a grid filled in with a set of reading-related challenges for your child. When they complete a challenge, they get to cross off the square or color it in. Each time they cross off five squares in a row, they win or “get bingo.” Eventually, they can complete the full card.
First, you’ll need a bingo card. As part of our mission to promote literacy for all, the Maya Smart team has created a free reading bingo card you can print at home, available to all our email subscribers.
Our reading bingo card contains 25 challenges for kids to complete, all aimed at turning reading into a game, from “read outside” and “read about animals” to “try a new book.” It’s written to work equally well for parents reading aloud to little ones and for young children reading on their own.
The game includes an intentional mix of challenges designed to get kids to:
- read more
- stretch their reading habits in new directions, and
- engage more with others around books.
Alternatively, you can easily create your own DIY reading bingo card—you’ll find suggestions for tailoring a reading bingo card just for your child later in this post.
Once you have your card, help your child read the challenges and pick an easy one to start them off with success. You might also help them come up with realistic goals about how often they hope to check off squares.
How to Use Reading Rewards to Motivate Reading
The challenge of completing the reading bingo game can be enough to get kids to pick up a book. However, you can also offer a reward for completing the bingo challenge if your child needs an extra push.
You can offer rewards for getting bingo, for completing a certain number of squares, or for completing the full card.
If you do decide to offer your child one or multiple rewards, it’s best to keep these as simple, healthy, and age-appropriate as possible. No need to buy them an iPad or shower them with candy for reading a book.
In fact, rewards don’t have to be material or financial at all. Instead, brainstorm things they enjoy or that make them happy, including special privileges or time together.
The key is to make the reward something that feels special, so think about privileges or outings that they don’t usually get. That can mean getting to play something they love with you (especially if it’s something you usually avoid or are too busy for) or taking them somewhere they love that you don’t visit often.
Even better, get them involved in coming up with their own privileges. Give them a few examples to get the ball rolling (before they start requesting a Nintendo Switch), and then ask for their ideas.
Ideas for Reading Rewards
Below are some examples of positive, age-appropriate reading rewards for young children to get you started. All these can grow with your child, encompassing new areas as they reach new ages and stages.
Special Privileges
- Choosing the family dinner
- Selecting a game to play together
- Picking the movie for a movie night
Special Time
- One-on-one time with a parent
- A special play date
- A game or movie night
Special Outings
- Going to a favorite park
- Taking a family bike ride
- Playing their favorite sport
Create a DIY Reading Bingo Card
Want to make your own reading bingo game? The first step is to think about your—and your child’s—goals. Is the main purpose just to get them to read? Or do you want them to try new topics, pick up specific books, or challenge themselves in a certain way?
The answers will inform what challenges you include on your reading bingo card. You might just come up with fun or goofy ways or places to read (upside down! in the bath!) to motivate more reading. Or you might challenge them to read certain books or stretch themselves somehow, such as tackling a more difficult book or a specific reading level. You can also include challenges like reading a particular number of books or pages in a given timeframe, or reading for a set length of time.
Just be sure to offer a mix of fun, doable challenges alongside ones your child will find more difficult, and make sure all the challenges are realistic for your child. After all, this is meant to be fun. (If they’re struggling too much, they may be lacking the necessary skills or need outside help.)
For maximum buy-in, have your child work with you to come up with the challenges and then let them write or decorate their own bingo card. (Our free reading bingo card has pictures for kids to color in.)
Whatever your child’s goals, the playful challenge of reading bingo can motivate them to get started. To make sure they stick with it, though, stay involved. Cheer on their successes, laugh with them, and share your own enthusiasm for books and reading. Your love is the secret ingredient that can elevate reading bingo or any other activity from blah to blessed. Have fun!
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