Learning how to teach Sean to read- part 3

I've just finished "Reading" 2nd edition by Frank Smith. The book is about the process of reading. In his book, he claims that whatever reading methods you use, children will learn to read all the same because children are learning beings. They are thirsty for knowledge and are learning all the time.

Franks Smith does not think the reading methods, either phonic nor sight reading, are the best way to teach reading. He feels that it's important that reading is made interesting for children, which means the best way to learn to read is by reading. The more you read, the more you learn. Therefore, it is important to give them reading materials that interest them.

The book itself is a rather dry reading because he talks a lot about scientific data about how the eyes and brains are involved in reading. However, his insights helps me confirm my intuition about reading, i.e. Phonic rules can be dry and boring. I tried teaching Sean some basic ones such as "c-at" "m-at" "b-at" "h-at". It just switches him off and he refuse to even listen. I think he's not ready for it yet. And that, interesting books are very important. Otherwise, you won't be interested to even start reading.

So all I've been doing is to borrow many books from the library, all sorts of types and read them to him. Sometimes he's interested, sometimes he's not. But most of the time he's interested. It's a trial and error thing because I don't know what will he like until we read it.

His current favorite books are "Shiver Me Letters, a Pirate ABC", " ALPHABEEP". This is because they are books about the alphabets which he already recognizes by heart. He has begun to parrot me when I read them to him. Not every page since some of the sentences are rather long.

Recently, I borrowed a book called " Good Night Gorilla" which caught his fancy. The illustration tells the story about how a small gorilla steals the keys and open all the cages of the animals, and then all of them followed the night watchman back to his house, which woke his wife up and she then brought the animals back to the zoo. Unknown to her, the gorilla stole the key again and followed her back to her bedroom.

The few words in the book are just " Good night gorilla", "Good night elephant", "Good night Lion", " Good night Hyena", " Good night Giraffe", " Good night Armadillo", " Good night dear"

This is a great book, not only it's a cute story, the words are so easy that even Sean can read them by himself (except for armadillo and dear). I wish there are more books like this. It tells so much with so few words.

Today, he read (with a bit of help from mummy) a small booklet by himself. It's a scholastic reader from his playgroup, a very short story about little and big. It reads like this:

Little and Big
This truck is little.
This truck is big.
This house is little.
This house is big.
This flower is little.
This flower is big.
This balloon is little.
This balloon is BIG!

I need to prompt him on "this" and " is" and I think he looks at the picture to give him a clue about the objects, but he can read the book! I'm so proud of him =D

And then, excitedly, I got him to read another short book which I scanned and made into a booklet for him.

Costume Party
I am a pirate
I am a doctor
I am a fire fighter (written as fire man)
I am a butterfly
I am a cowboy
I am a space girl (written as space boy)
I am a crocodile.
Snap! Snap! Snap!

He needs prompting on "I" "am" "a", which is basically most of the sentence, and he reads the rest from memory, because "fire fighter" and "space girl" are actually written in the original book that the school let him bring home.

From all these and from what I've read, I just think that early reading is all about memory. It's difficult for children to remember " I", "This" and grammatical rules because they are interested in the meaning of the story, not the actual sentence. To them the words "the", "is", "am" are not important and are omitted in their reading.

In fact, Frank Smith feels that by insisting on word perfect reading, you are actually interfering with the process of reading because it's the comprehension that's important, not the actual perfect reading of a sentence.

Actually, Sean still omits all these grammatical words even when he speaks, so I guess, it's natural for him to omit them when he reads. However, it is already exciting enough that he's started to want to read by himself and not always insisting that I read for him.

I still think Phonics has a lot of benefits despite Frank Smith's disregard. If you are interested in learning more about Phonics, read " Why Johny Can't Read" which deals with phonics and it even teaches you how to teach phonics. However, I don't think I'm going to teach Sean phonics yet. I'll let him enjoy reading from memory first and later helps him with his phonics when the time comes, maybe when he's 4 years old.

Sean, congratulations on reading your first books, "Good Night Gorilla" and " Big and Little". Mummy is very proud of you. =D