When your kid is desperate to spell a word—even if they type “Ueuuehh” for skateboard—that’s your golden teaching moment.
Case in point: a hilarious viral clip of a sharp five-year-old lecturing his mom on her unwillingness to download an app for him. “That’s not taking ownership,” he scolds. When she questions his understanding, he nails it: “It’s being responsibility.” He knows exactly what he means.
When Mom still says no, he takes matters into his own hands, typing a query in the app store: Ueuuehh. Does this say skateboard? he asks her. Not quite, buddy. But wow—what persistence, creativity, and focus on display. He can’t spell yet, but he’s thinking, questioning, problem-solving.
He’s locked in. He’s motivated. He wants to be able to type skateboard. (He doesn’t yet know that he can ask Siri and bypass writing altogether. Thank goodness!)
These are our teachable moments. This is when we can lean in and give a little print-focused literacy lesson. Reading means connecting sounds to print—what researchers call the alphabetic principle. To type skateboard, the child has to hear the /s/ sound, know it’s linked to a letter, and recall that letter is S. He won’t stumble onto that by chance. He needs grownups to point it out.
Here’s how: Point out letters to your child or write letters to show them. Trace the letters with your finger. Say their names. Call out the sounds. For example, you could say, “See this L? Long line, short line. It says /l/, like in Lucky Charms.” These light touches—on signs, cereal boxes, stoplights—help kids notice letters, recognize patterns, and link sounds to print.
These teachable moments happen naturally between the ages of about 3 and 6. The key is recognizing and seizing them. Keep it casual. Comment on a letter here and there as you go through daily life. If your child doesn’t seem interested, move on and try again later. Never let it become frustrating.
Research shows early mastery of these connections predicts later reading and spelling success. You don’t need fancy programs—just curiosity, patience, and 30 seconds a day. Today, pick one letter in your home, trace it with your child, and talk about its name, shape, and sound.
Get Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child
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
It was my pleasure to join Nancy Redd on her Mompreneurs podcast recently to talk about my journey as a mom, entrepreneur, and author of Reading for Our Lives. Our conversation emphasized one simple truth I want every parent to know: we are our children’s first and best teachers. Long before our kids set foot in a classroom, our voices, conversations, and shared stories lay the foundation for their reading success.
There’s no magic bullet for literacy. Instead, what your child really needs is you—your voice and your attention, across the days and years. The good news is that you don’t need fancy toys or expensive programs. Talking with your child from infancy (even before they can respond) and as they grow builds their vocabulary and strengthens their brain. Reading picture books, asking questions, and giving your child time to think and reply can turn everyday moments into literacy lessons. These simple, consistent interactions add up to something powerful over time.
Another point I shared is that we parents must not underestimate our influence on our children’s literacy, which shapes their whole academic experience and beyond. Schools and teachers matter deeply, but their work rests on the groundwork parents build at home. Whether it’s five minutes of story time, a playful chat in the car, or a mini ABC lesson over breakfast, each little interaction contributes to your child’s growth.
A few more takeaways from our conversation:
- Knowledge and comprehension fuel literacy. Learning to sound out words is essential, but kids must also know what the words mean. Without rich conversation and exposure to different ideas and experiences, they’ll lack the context to make sense of what they read.
- Reading and writing still matter in the tech age. Artificial intelligence and tech tools may smooth over weakness in reading and writing, there’s no substitute for being able to think independently and communicate effectively. Ask your child: Do they want to be the person who’s reliant on these tools, or the person who shapes them?
- When it comes to screen time, parents set the pace. If we’re always on our phones, kids see screens as the norm. Even more, we lose valuable opportunities to talk, respond, teach, and read to our children. To help your child, start by modeling balance yourself.
Watch our full conversation below. And if you’d like to dive deeper into the science behind these ideas—plus get practical tips for weaving them into your family life—I share more in my book, Reading for Our Lives. It’s a guide for parents who want to raise strong, confident readers, right from day one.
Get Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child
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 Every parent deserves to feel empowered as their child’s first teacher—and every child deserves the chance to thrive. That’s the driving force behind my book Reading for Our Lives and the community campaign I’ve built around it.
I wrote this book for parents raising readers, but I now have family-facing professionals in mind, too: nurses, early intervention specialists, child development educators, and social workers that parents turn to for guidance. These trusted advisors are uniquely positioned to share the book with families and help them act on its messages.
That’s why I created a way for generous readers to donate copies of Reading for Our Lives in bulk to organizations that already serve families. While some people are buying extra copies to give out at baby showers or pediatrician waiting rooms, I wanted to make it easier to give at scale—to get dozens or hundreds of books into programs with real reach.
The Impact in Action
Take Penfield Children’s Center in Milwaukee, which sends trained parent and child support professionals into homes to serve more than 1,600 children under age three in Milwaukee County alone. They already deliver children’s books, puzzles, and learning games to support early literacy. Now, they’ll be able to offer Reading for Our Lives to support parents too, giving them tools, inspiration, and confidence to lead their children’s learning from the start.
The book campaign will also deliver free books to families served by organizations including Penfield Children’s Center, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee, and St. Francis Children’s Center.
How It Works
I’m thrilled to partner with Harmonic Harvest, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit whose mission of community empowerment aligns perfectly with Reading for Our Lives. This collaboration combines their expertise in community engagement with my focus on early literacy to create lasting change for families. When you donate to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund, Harmonic Harvest handles the logistics—issuing tax receipts and working with local independent booksellers to distribute copies to partner organizations. Your dollars support families, community organizations, and neighborhood businesses all at once, creating impact that extends far beyond individual books.
This isn’t just about dropping off books and walking away. Every program that receives donated copies also gets access to live virtual Q&A calls with me, plus invitations to educational events and conversations. We’re not just building readers—we’re building a community of support around them.
Join the Movement
If you believe that every parent deserves support and every child deserves the chance to thrive, I invite you to contribute to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund today. Together, we can put powerful books in the hands of families and the professionals who walk alongside them every day.
Let’s build something beautiful—one book, one conversation, one child at a time.
Here’s what happened when Fox 6’s Carl Deffenbaugh and I talked about turning lazy summer days into literacy goldmines.
Picture this: It’s July in Milwaukee. School’s been out for weeks, and parents are wondering if their kids’ brains are slowly turning to mush. Sound familiar?
That’s exactly what Carl Daffenbaugh (fellow Medill School of Journalism alum!) and I unpacked during my recent Fox 6 Milwaukee morning show appearance.
Plot twist: When summer breaks the rigid routines of the school year, all learning isn’t lost. The change of season creates space for the kind of natural, joyful learning that actually sticks.
Your Minivan Is a Mobile Classroom for Summer Learning
Summer is a goldmine for language and literacy learning—precisely because routines are disrupted. Those long road trips, impromptu museum visits, and endless grocery runs? They’re packed with learning potential.
Think about it: Words like acceleration, corkscrew, and harness may show up in class someday—but at an amusement park, staring up at the foreboding climbs and precipitous drops? That’s vocabulary in action: vivid, memorable, meaningful.
Unlike the classroom, summer hands you organic teaching moments at every turn. The farmer’s market becomes a lesson in colors, textures, and seasons. The drive-through line becomes an opportunity to read menus together. All you have to do is notice—and talk.
The Great Baby Talk Debate (Spoiler: You Can Do Both)
During the segment, I urged viewers to treat their babies’ coos and babbles as real conversation, and to respond. Yes, even when it sounds like gibberish. These early “chats” help build the brain connections that support language and reading later on.
Carl brought up the question every parent wonders about: Is baby talk bad for kids?
My response: Go ahead and use silly voices sometimes—kids love them. But pair it with real words for real things. Say “Look at the enormous truck!” instead of “Wook at da big-big twuck!”
You are your child’s primary vocabulary builder. If you don’t introduce rich, meaningful words, who will?
The Research That Will Blow Your Mind
“There are correlations between the language skills of toddlers and their IQ and vocabulary as middle schoolers,” I shared with Carl and the Fox 6 audience.
Think about that. The words you and your two-year-old exchange today predict their language and literacy performance years down the road.
The action step? Continue having those back-and-forth conversations. Ask your little ones lots of questions and give them opportunities to think and use the vocabulary they’ve learned.
Those everyday chats about cloud shapes, grocery lists, and bedtime stories are building your child’s academic future, one conversation at a time.
Permission to Keep Summer Learning Simple
Here’s your official permission slip: Effective literacy support doesn’t require turning your home into a school this summer.
“Even if your child is two or three, you can start pointing out letters. This is an S—see how it curves? These little things that don’t feel like lessons are really impactful over time,” I explained to viewers.
The magic happens in the moments that don’t feel like teaching at all. Weave the summer learning lessons into everyday life—it’s easier for you and more effective for them.
The Bottom Line
Want to dive deeper? All of this—and so much more—is in Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan To Help Your Child. Because raising readers shouldn’t be complicated, but it should be intentional.
In May, I had the incredible privilege of interviewing Ibram X. Kendi during the Milwaukee stop of his Malcolm Lives tour. The event, hosted by America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Niche Book Bar, and Boswell Books, was electric—equal parts literary conversation, history lesson, and community gathering.
But what moved me most? The kids.
The crowd was mostly adults, so the wide-eyed young readers stuck out, and I made sure to call on them during the open Q&A. They raised their hands. They asked questions. They waited patiently (and giddily) in line to get their books signed. And they walked out with more than an autograph—they left with a spark.
Bringing kids to author events isn’t just cute or educational. It’s transformational.
1. Meeting the Author Makes the Book Come Alive
When young people meet an author, the words on the page suddenly feel personal. They’re no longer reading a story by a name—they’re engaging with a real person who chose every scene, fact, and phrase with care.
As Kendi explained during our talk, “Stories are the greatest teachers.” And when kids hear directly from the storyteller, their learning deepens. They get behind-the-scenes access to the writing process, the research, the emotional labor—and the joy. One young attendee asked what inspired Kendi to write this book. His answer was that he wanted young people facing tough circumstances to see themselves in Malcolm and think, “Despite all of that, I can still transform the world.”
2. They See Reading and Writing as Real, Powerful Work
We often talk about reading as a gateway to academic success. But seeing an author in action reframes it: reading is a gateway to connection, conversation, and change.
Kendi described how he became a “real reader” at age 23. At the time, he was in graduate school, surrounded by peers who were referencing books and authors he hadn’t yet read. That experience stirred a sense of urgency—and humility. He felt like an outsider, unsure if he belonged. So he dove in, reading nearly 100 books in a single year. “Creating spaces where reading is valued where you feel like you have to read to belong—that’s what did it for me, ” he said. “And that’s what did it for Malcolm.”
When kids attend an author talk, they don’t just hear about the book. They experience reading and writing as tools for exploration, empowerment, and expression.
3. It Plants Seeds for Lifelong Curiosity
Books carry stories. Events create memories. Together, they build identity.
One powerful element of the Malcolm Lives event was the setting: America’s Black Holocaust Museum. As Kendi shared Malcolm’s story—one of displacement, resistance, transformation—the museum’s exhibits stood as a living testament to the broader black experience in America. It was history and present-day reckoning, all in one place.
In our conversation, we talked about how Kendi layered the book with “split screens” of past and present, inviting readers to see how history still shapes their neighborhoods, families, and prospects today. That kind of framing helps young people see reading not just as decoding words but as decoding the world.
4. It’s a Memory You’ll Both Treasure
Author events amplify your everyday family literacy rituals. They’re not just about the Q&A or the autograph; they’re about walking out with your child and hearing them say, “I want to read more about that.” Or “I didn’t know Malcolm lived in Milwaukee.” Or even, “I want to write something, too.”
Want to raise a real reader? Bring them to author talks. Let them ask questions. Let them be moved. Let them see that behind every book is a person—and that people like them write books, too.And if you missed Dr. Kendi’s Milwaukee stop, Malcolm Lives is available now. Grab a copy and read it together. The story’s powerful. The conversations it sparks? Even more so.
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