“The first thing kids should learn about words is that they have meaning.”
That’s what I wrote in a guest post for The Imagination Tree recently. And it’s true! While there is plenty of practice that does — and needs to — go on with pieces and parts of words, rearranging letters, and practicing sounds and sight words, we must remember that with all of that, kids need a strong foundation in using words to receive and send meaning.
We’re really quite fixated on the importance of literacy in education, but if reading isn’t connected to meaning, all we’re teaching kids to do is string a bunch of sounds together. That’s not literacy.
In this old article from a 2005 issue NAEYC’s Young Child magazine, Susan Neuman and Kathleen Roskos, leading researchers in the field of early literacy, wrote about the importance of infusing meaning into the literacy experiences of early readers.
In reference to the joint position statement created by NAEYC and the International Reading Association outlining developmentally appropriate practice in literacy instruction, the authors wrote:
“The research-based statement stresses that for children to become skilled readers, they need to develop a rich language and conceptual knowledge base, a broad and deep vocabulary, and verbal reasoning abilities to understand messages conveyed through print. At the same time, it recognizes that children also must develop code-related skills” (phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, etc.).
“But to attain a high level of skill, young children need many opportunities to develop these strands interactively, not in isolation. Meaning, not sounds or letters, drives children’s earliest experiences with print. Therefore, the position statement points out that although specific skills like alphabet knowledge are important to literacy development, children must acquire these skills in coordination and interaction with meaningful experiences (Neuman, Bredekamp, & Copple 2000).”
How do you create a culture of literacy that is rich in meaning? Here are a few key ideas.
Read. A lot.
Read books. Then read more books. One of the highest predictors of a child’s literacy is their exposure to books and being read to.
But reading goes beyond books. Write notes and letters so you can read them aloud. Read store signs and cereal boxes. Point out symbols your children find interesting and talk about what they mean. All of these types of reading create a great foundation for literacy as they get to the root of reading: constructing meaning from symbols.
My own young preschooler was with me recently as we purchased a “No Smoking” sign for our home building site. We talked about what it meant briefly, without much thought on my part. But ever since then, every time my little guy sees a big red circle with a line through it, he “reads” the sign. “No Smoking”, “No Bikes”, “No Phones”.
To us grown ups, it seems like “pretend reading” when kids read from symbols, environmental print, or the familiar pictures of a favorite story, but in the early stages of literacy it’s all about getting meaning from symbols — whether that symbol is a string of letters or a beg red circle with a slash through it, it paves the way for literacy.
Talk. A lot.
I mentioned books and being read to as a big predictor of literacy success, and that fact is fairly well-known. But another is how much a child is spoken to. In a seminal study, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley showed that children who were exposed to more words showed dramatic advantages over peers who were exposed to fewer words, even when controlled for other strong influences, such as socio-economic differences.
More recent studies have shown that there is more than meets the eye here. The “30 Million Word Gap” as it has come to be known as, is more than just a word advantage, but a conversation advantage. Children who are engaged in conversations (talked with, rather than talked at) show strong gains over children who are primarily on the receiving end of verbal exchanges.
I wrote about this difference in How Do You Talk When You Teach?, outlining the difference between direction, instruction, and discussion. This is a difference that matters at home as well as in the classroom.
Sing Songs.
Singing is a great way to boost language and literacy skills all on its own, with the phonological awareness that comes with rhythm and rhyme, but you can amp that up even more when you put the lyrics to paper and let the kids not only read the words, but interact with them.
I wrote about how I have used song charts in my classroom and why I’m a bit partial to a certain Beatles song for practicing sight words, all over at The Imagination Tree.
Write in Front of Their Eyes.
Help children to understand that the written word has meaning, by putting their own words on paper. Take dictation as a child tells you his/her own story. Read back the writing as you go, as well as every few sentences as they are completed, to reinforce that the symbols written on the page are the same ones that were spoken.
Create books from experiences by taking pictures and then creating the text together with your children. (Here’s one example from a class field trip to a greenhouse.) This type of activity takes literacy full circle, from experience, to spoken words, to written words, to a book to be read and experienced over and over.
Play.
Sometimes we have to play with individual words to figure out patterns and gain familiarity with sight words. The rapid recall necessary for these common (but often less than intuitively spelled) words makes frequent practice necessary. Making this type of reading practice playful by using games can help make that experience more meaningful than would dry drilling. Here are some great resources for playful approaches to learning sight words.
50 Playful Sight Word Activities {Childhood 101}
Gross Motor Reading Game – Pizza Delivery {No Time For Flash Cards}
3 All Time Best Games to Play with Sight Words {Teach Mama}
12 Sight Word Activities with a Lot of Hands On Learning {Hands On As We Grow}
You may also enjoy reading the series: Why Don’t You Teach Reading: A Look at Emergent Literacy.
All of that is great, Amanda, but you’ve left out one thing, Key Words (or Key Vocabulary) — this is the simple, elegant way Sylvia Ashton-Warner taught us to teach beginning reading. Here’s what Paul Goodman said about it in Compulsory Education:
Consider…the method employed by Sylvia Ashton-Warner in teaching little Maoris. She gets them to ask for their own words, the particular gut word of fear, lust, or despair that is obsessing the child that day; this is written for him on strong cardboard, he learns it instantaneously and never forgets it, and soon he has an exciting, if odd, vocabulary. From the beginning, writing is by demand, practical, magical’ and of course it is simply an extension of speech–it is the best and strongest speech, as writing should be. What is read is what somebody is importantly trying to tell.
I have taught four-year-olds (and olders) who left me to enter kindergarten reading 15 to 85 words, in communities of color with this system since the 1960s, (it is, additionally, always culturally salient, and I’m a white teacher who doesn’t want to be dismissive of the children’s culture) and as recently as 2014 (by request, in Singapore) and have written about it in my first two books, The Sun’s Not Broken, A Cloud’s Just in the Way: On Child-Centered Teaching and Pay Attention to the Children, Lessons for Teachers and Parents from Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Both of these, and my new book, Seeing Young Children with New Eyes: What We’ve Learned from Reggio Emilia about Children and Ourselves are available from http://www.eceteacher.org
People interested in learning more about Key Words are encouraged to read Ashton-Warner’s book, Teacher, and my books, or to come and study it with me in San Francisco. I’m also available to come and teach teachers this work in other communities. I know it is a joy for children to learn to read words that matter to them such as mommy, monster, perfume, stegosaurus, and the names of their friends.
Please don’t discount the importance of learning to connect letters to sounds and to blend sounds into words. 15% of the population worldwide has some degree of dyslexia, and WILL NOT learn to read without explicit, systematic, sequential, multisensory instruction in how to decode words. No amount of exposure or reading to a dyslexic child will transform them into readers, no matter how engaging and meaningful the material is. The simple fact is, if you cannot get the words off the page, you cannot access the meaning and joy of reading.