The reassuring authors of raise-a-reader books often prescribe a chill pill and a nightly dose of bedtime stories to parents anxious about their kids’ reading. They devote page after page to poignant stories of family reading, complete with shared laughs and smiles, the warmth and comfort of a parent’s lap, and the smell and feel of a book’s spine cracked open for the first time.
I love the joy-of-reading sentiment and the moving accounts of family memory-making around books, but I worry about the comparative silence around other literacy-building activities. The groundswell of storytime support (though well-deserved) leads many parents to wrongly conclude that reading aloud regularly is all it takes to raise thriving readers.
There’s danger in declaring that the achievement of life goals (like college, fulfilling work, economic independence) will “flow naturally” from a love of books and stories—as New York Times Book Review editors Maria Russo and Pamela Paul do in How to Raise a Reader. There’s a risk in urging us to focus on the “pure” pleasure of reading and to leave the nuts and bolts of phonics, assessments, and benchmarks to schools. There’s a cost to minimizing the role of direct skills instruction in the home and framing it as a boring pursuit best left to teachers.
In reality, there’s so much more than reading aloud that we should do to support our children’s literacy, from building oral language skills through intentional conversation to directly teaching letter names and sounds when needed. And, frankly, most of us can’t afford to rely on schools alone to teach reading skills. Schools simply aren’t equipped to get the job done without outside help. Witness the skyrocketing demand for private tutoring in the elementary years and the low reading achievement scores among demographics that can’t access supplemental instruction.
Children whose parents can’t (or won’t) afford expensive remediation are far-too-frequently suffering long-term and even lifetime consequences. And families whose parents can (and do) purchase extra help for their children are losing dollars and hours that might well have been saved through proactive literacy activities in the early years.
Keeping it real, here are four reasons why parents need to learn to teach—not just model—reading:
1. Parents are best positioned to lay a strong foundation for literacy. The groundwork for successful reading is laid in the pivotal first five years of life. As children’s first teachers, parents need to know how reading develops if we are to play our role to full advantage. Parents are fully capable of bolstering pre-reading skills in fun and effective ways from day one.
Limiting our literacy activity to reading bedtime stories essentially means forfeiting considerable power to seed reading success. Instead, we should be laying the reading groundwork by consciously boosting oral literacy skills, directly teaching letter sounds and names, and intentionally directing kids’ attention to print conventions, such as reading from left to right and from top to bottom.
Kindergarten language skills are the single best predictor of school achievement across all subjects in third and fifth grade.
2. Parents who understand typical reading development are more attuned to early risk factors and warning signs of challenges. The first signs of dyslexia can emerge in children as young as one to two years old, long before school starts. Parents are uniquely well-suited to monitor early developmental milestones and to discover any family history of reading trouble—making it more likely children will receive timely intervention if they need it and thus boosting the odds of success.
3. We can’t assume our children will receive quality reading instruction in school. Sadly, teacher inexperience, muddled curriculum, and schools’ weak assessment and remediation capacity combine to hobble most students’ reading progress. The National Council on Teacher Quality evaluated universities a few years ago on how well they were preparinge teachers to teach reading, and dozens of them earned failing marks—including highly regarded schools of education.
Just 37 percent of teacher preparation programs trained prospective teachers in the best evidence-based reading instruction methods at that time. Only 11 states effectively tested special education and elementary teacher candidates on their science-of-reading knowledge and skills. And in some publicly funded universities, teacher candidates received as little as 20 minutes of phonics instruction in their two-year-long teacher prep programs. All that means that many teachers in service now missed out on fundamental preparation to effectively teach reading.
4. Kids need well-informed advocates within schools to ensure that their individual needs are met. When kids enter school, our role as parents expands to include overseeing how well our children’s school, teachers, and curriculum meet their needs. We’re only prepared to do that work well when we’ve already put in the time to understand typical reading development, to recognize when our children are on the path, and to grasp what’s needed to foster future growth.
I understand where cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham is coming from when he warns parents to “resist the urge to engage in reading instruction unless you have reason to believe you know what you’re doing” in his book, Raising Kids Who Read. And I’m calling on all parents to accept the challenge of learning what to do to teach reading. Your child’s education just might depend on it.
To help, I’ve crafted a digital course that’s designed to be a kind of reading boot camp for parents. It’s a small time commitment, all done on your own schedule. In it, parents learn easy, fun, high-impact ways to prepare kids aged 0-5 for reading success in kindergarten and beyond. Check out Reading Made Simple now!
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Emphatic and unsparing, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy explores the weight of wellness in a culture obsessed with lean. His expansive intelligence and fluid prose bear up to haunting family secrets and American deceptions with deep, potent wells of beauty, humor, and empathy.
Initially conceived as a weight-loss story chronicling his family’s struggles with food and violence, the writing of Heavy, which was recently named a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, got murkier when relatives sidestepped his interview questions or lied altogether. “We’re a family, like most families, of addicts, but we never talked about the addiction,” he says. “We would talk about losing weight or gaining weight but we never talked about why. We never talked about particular memories around domestic, sexual, and racial violence.”
Continue reading “Kiese Laymon Discusses Heavy”Grandparents Day may be in September, but it’s well worth celebrating grandmas and grandpas and nanas and paw-paws year-round. After all, there are more grandparents today than ever before, according to The Census Bureau, and grandparents are playing a bigger role in more and more children’s lives. Grandparents are quietly, powerfully shaping children’s learning and literacy today in pivotal ways, as Maya wrote in Katie Couric Media.
The special ways grandparents love, teach, and relate to their children’s children is proven fodder for vivid, powerful storytelling. Look no further than these 12 books that are ideal for Grandparents Day and all year long. These books make great gifts for grandparents to share with grandchildren and also beautiful ways to treasure special memories. May they remind us of our elders’ wisdom, wit, and care, as well as the role we can play in fostering space for those irreplaceable bonds to bloom.
If you and your little one are counting down the days and minutes until Super Sunday kickoff, why not pass the time with some fun football reading? Just use this specially curated list to put together an awesome Super Bowl-themed story time.
You’ll find a selection of picture books to read for the Super Bowl that channel game day energy as they celebrate teamwork, courage, and the thrill of chasing dreams. You’ll discover winning reads for both little football fans and newcomers to the game. The titles range from explanations of the sport and the Super Bowl tradition to true tales of dogged determination and playful fictional adventures.
So grab a cozy spot, huddle up, and enjoy some super reads that will keep the fun going long after the game ends.
Got a kid who loves math and numbers? Or are you looking for a way to sneak a little math into your young child’s day without groans or worksheets? Picture books can be a solution to either equation. (Pun intended.) Through fun storytelling and vibrant illustrations, children can explore numbers, shapes, and problem-solving while getting lost in an adventure.
The books on this list aren’t just fun stories—they’re specially selected picture books to make math fun for kids, reminding us that books teach so much more than literacy. As Reading Rainbow reminded us, “Take a look, it’s in a book!” When math topics are woven into smart plots or colorful characters, they present math as it is: something alive and exciting, not just pages of equations. Read on for a list of playful math picture books you can count on!
Counting and Number Sense
Addition and Subtraction
Geometry
Measurement
Multiple Math Skills
Grandparents’ Day may be in September, but a new crop of picture books is here to help us celebrate grandmas and grandpas and nanas and paw-paws year-round. That’s only fitting, because there are more grandparents today than ever before, according to The Census Bureau.
And the special ways they love, teach and relate to their children’s children is proven fodder for vivid, powerful storytelling. Look no further than these three titles I discovered at the Texas Book Festival. May they remind us of our elders’ wisdom, wit and care, as well as the role we can play in fostering space for those irreplaceable bonds to bloom.
Authors or illustrators associated with each of these books took part in the Texas Book Festival’s Reading Rock Stars program. This hands-on program sends nationally recognized authors into Title I schools in Texas to deliver dynamic presentations and give kids autographed books to take home. Want to support the program or bring it to your school? Click here to learn more.
Continue reading “Austin Woman: Maya Smart is Tackling Inequality One Book at a Time”
Continue reading “Austin Woman: Maya Smart is Tackling Inequality One Book at a Time”
Many picture books aim to spur conversation around the quirks of English spelling, but Beth Anderson’s An Inconvenient Alphabet is a class above. While alphabet books like the popular P Is for Pterodactyl highlight unconventional spellings without illuminating the why’s behind them, An Inconvenient Alphabet goes much deeper. It brings to life some of the history and power dynamics responsible for English spelling—in ways that intrigue adults and children alike.
The book explores the true story of Ben Franklin and Noah Webster’s shared belief that English has letters with too many sounds (think: the various g sounds in goat, giraffe, and laugh), sounds with too many letters (the k sound in chorus, kite, cat, and quiet), and some letters that just aren’t needed at all (the silent letters in lamb, walk, knock, give). The bright, energetic marriage of text and illustration powerfully presents their efforts to revamp spelling in the service of American unity, identity, and clear communication.
Letters themselves, the 26 we know plus others Franklin created that never took off, are important characters in the book. Designed to represent the sounds aw, uh, edh, ing, ish and eth, Franklin’s new letters are depicted as 3D models carried around in a sack and handed out for examination. When I read the book with my daughter, she anticipated objections to the new letters—they look funny, would be tough to learn, and would make old books harder to read.
Illustrated with color, movement, and flair, the lively letters heighten the smart, inventive book’s explanatory power. Kids can see the oddity of the proposed letters, as well as the resistance in the faces of townspeople when Franklin shares them.
When Franklin’s introduction of new letters flops, the book moves on to Webster—the founder of the famous dictionary. It recounts his attempts (and mostly failures) to make English spelling more phonetic by advocating for using existing letters differently. Namely, he pushed for getting rid of silent letters (thum vs. thumb), plus using one vowel for short sounds (hed vs. head) and two for long ones (seet vs. seat). We read about how a few of his changes were adopted in fits and starts, and others rejected wholesale.
“Next time you sound out a word, think of Ben and Noah,” the book concludes. “THAY WUD BEE PLEEZ’D BEECUZ THAT IZ EGZAKTELEE WUT THAY WONTED!”
Informative and funny, An Inconvenient Alphabet shows how English spelling represents much more than letter-sound correspondences. Letter sequences, it reveals, embody choices that people and publishers have made, based on their own accents, understanding, and ideas about the value of tradition.
And people’s resistance to purely phonetic spelling has something to teach also: that history and meaning matter—and old (spelling) habits die hard.
Do you think English spelling should be made more phonetic? If so, why? And whose pronunciation would you use as the model, given the range of English pronunciations around the world?
Sources and Further Reading
Treiman, Rebecca, “Teaching and Learning Spelling,” Child Development Perspectives 12, 4 (2018): 235-239.
Treiman, Rebecca, “Statistical Learning and Spelling,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 49 (2018): 644-652.
Sliter, L., “Cough, Cough: Here Are 10 Different Ways To Say ‘ough’,” Dictionary.com Everything After Z, accessed February 7, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/e/s/ough/.
Treiman, Rebecca, and Brett Kessler, Kelly Boland, Hayley Clocksin, and Zhengdao Chen, “Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers,” Child Development, 89, 4 (August 2018): e431-e443.
Doyle, A., J. Zhang, and C. Mattatall, “Spelling Instruction in the Primary Grades: Teachers’ Beliefs, Practices, and Concerns,” Reading Horizons 54 (2015): 1–34.
Fresch, M. J., “A National Survey of Spelling Instruction: Investigating Teachers’ Beliefs and Practice,” J. Lit. Res. 35 (2003): 819–848.
Jones, A. C. et al, “Beyond the Rainbow: Retrieval Practice Leads to Better Spelling than does Rainbow Writing,” Educ. Psychol. Rev. 28 (2016): 385–400.
In English, there are 26 letters, 44 sounds, and 250 or more different ways to spell those sounds. That means phonetic spelling will only get kids so far. Yet how many times have parents uttered “sound it out” to a child asking how to spell a word?
Kids’ responses to this refrain are often as wrong as they are reasonable. Think: spelling does with duz. Silent letters, single letters representing multiple sounds, and a slew of sounds with the same pronunciation, but vastly different spellings, all complicate English. Not to mention letter combinations like -ough, which is pronounced ten different ways. Yes, ten. (Rough, plough, through, slough, though, cough, hiccough, thought, thorough, lough.)
Don’t get me wrong: knowing how sounds typically correspond to letters is crucial for approximating spelling. But when there are multiple phonetically plausible options, spellers need more information to choose the correct one. There are three main ways they tend to get this information: exposure, memorization, and instruction.
Let’s take a look at each to gain insights that can help us parents facilitate better spelling sooner—and bolster reading speed and comprehension to boot.
Exposure. Kids learn a great deal about spelling without being explicitly taught, and this learning begins as soon as they pay attention to print. Their environments—the books, signs, and other text surrounding them—provide the raw material for subconscious learning. Whenever kids lock in on the letters in books, on signs, on toys, and elsewhere, they begin soaking up and analyzing simple visual characteristics of written language.
Kids instinctively apply this knowledge of letter combination probabilities to even their earliest spelling attempts. Preschool-aged kids demonstrate unconscious knowledge of visual patterns in spelling, long before learning that letters represent speech sounds or starting to attempt to spell phonetically. They tend to write common letter sequences (like bi) more often than infrequent ones (like bn) in those seemingly random strings of letters kids produce early on, according to multiple studies. As they advance in age toward kindergarten, children tend to overuse letters from their own names, and letter combinations in alphabetic order, in their word-like scribblings. Their writing attempts reflect the print they’ve noticed most.
Researchers call this process “statistical learning,” because kids’ spelling efforts are informed by how frequently they’ve seen letters appear in certain combinations, orders, and positions within words. The children aren’t consciously counting the instances of various letter sequences or calculating probabilities, but they’ve gathered the data and synthesized it to inform their own writing, nonetheless.
But great spellers aren’t made through print exposure and reading alone. Unconscious pattern recognition has its limits. First, children have to have sufficient exposure to print and pay attention to it for statistical learning to kick in. In the beginning, this focus requires an adult directing them—for instance, pointing to the text accompanying an illustration in a picture book, or their name on a paper.
And the more complex, contextual, or rare the pattern, the harder it is and longer it takes to grasp subconsciously. Patterns that exist in one circumstance but not another are tricky. (Think spelling the short o sound with an a after w or qu—like in swab, squad, or wallet—but spelling it with o otherwise—like in odd, body, or olive.)
Simply put, formal spelling instruction offers a more direct path to the language knowledge that kids need, as we’ll see lower in this post. Exposure supports and lays the groundwork for that instruction.
Memorization. Students also learn to spell words by memorizing them, although this method works worse than you’d expect, given its popularity in schools. Spelling isn’t a solely visual task that can be learned effectively by copying words or staring at them. Teachers commonly report that the method fails to help kids spell on tests or in real-world writing.
Still, many instructors keep on outsourcing such busywork to parents, asking us to oversee nightly spelling practice in preparation for Friday quizzes. Not that the word lists and quizzes themselves are the problem; it’s the lack of instruction in how to learn the words.
First-grade homework folders from coast to coast often include “spelling spirals”—writing the week’s words in coil shapes—and “rainbow writing”—copying words using different colored pencils. These kinds of copying activities show up frequently in spelling programs, leading teachers to think they deliver key spelling practice in a fun package. But there’s little evidence they help kids learn—and they aren’t much fun, either.
A group of educational psychologists (three of whom are parents whose kids had been assigned rainbow writing) decided to test the value of copying words in different colors. They performed some small experiments with first and second graders to measure the rainbow writing’s value against something called “retrieval practice.” In the latter, the teacher dictates a word, the student spells the word on paper, and compares their spelling attempts to the correct spelling, then the student flips his paper over, and does it all again.
Though both are essentially memorization exercises, time spent exerting effort to recall or “retrieve” spellings (versus merely rewriting them) was more effective. Retrieval practice led to better spelling and the students reported liking it more, too. Still, one-off memorization of individual words, one by one, through either copying or retrieval practice leaves something to be desired. Namely, deeper knowledge of our written language.
Instruction. Unsurprisingly, students also learn to spell well when they are directly taught how the language works. Properly approached, spelling is a rich, multifaceted content area that includes many areas of instruction:
- Speech sounds: Discerning and segmenting consonant sounds, vowel sounds, and syllable patterns.
- Letter knowledge: Spotting, naming, and forming letters; knowing that they can represent speech sounds in writing; and having a sense of their typical positions and combinations within words.
- Spelling patterns: Knowing the most common spelling patterns and the patterns within the most frequently encountered words.
- Meaning: Identifying, analyzing, and combining bases, prefixes, and suffixes. Understanding how suffixes can change a base word’s number, tense, or part of speech.
- History: Recognizing that words come from a variety of sources, including other languages, and that their origin impacts spelling.
Practically speaking, just knowing that spelling is about more than sounding out words puts you ahead of the parent spelling-knowledge curve. Stay tuned for upcoming posts that tackle each of these spelling topics in turn.
