Ever have a desire to teach your children to read or aid them in their path to reading? I always tried to remember that all of our children’s education was our responsibility, and all of the tools and learning environments we chose were aiding us in that goal. We cannot just leave our children to others to educate them because no one wants them to succeed like their family does. Proverbs 1:8-9 explains how precious our instruction is for our children: "Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck." Our daughter, Shelby, is teaching Oliver to ready as you can see in the picture below. She is adorning him with a precious gift, which will eventually allow him to read the Word of God and many other important pieces of literature and items of instruction. I would like to pass on some ideas I have about learning to read that I have learned about in my Master's degree in teaching English and my PhD classes in in Linguistics. I will keep it all in layman's terms, because the main idea is to teach our kids to read not to be confusing. I recently had a dear friend, Kenia, send me a cute video of her husband helping her children with their reading skills. Love that Dad was involved….well done, Nati!!! They were using a method of memorizing some of the most common words found in literature in the Hebrew language. Their expressed purpose for this activity was in order to aid in their children's reading fluency. Love it! Not a bad idea at all, but this blog will discuss the method's place in the process of teaching your children to read. Kenia gave me permission to share this video so have a look below, and THANK YOU, KENIA! ,After Kenia posted this video to a moms' group we are on together, I complimented her work with the children. I also lovingly cautioned her to be careful that this is not their ONLY method. Kenia assured me that was the case (Thank the Lord for wise parents who do their homework!). I actually ONLY love this method as a supplement. If you like the idea of using a whole word method as a supplement, click here for some flashcards. However, please remember the age old and tried and true method of learning to read for alphabetic languages (like English) is to teach reading using PHONICS. When you use this method, you teach your child to read letters or groups of letters by teaching them to say the sound the letter or group of letters represents. There was big push in the 1920’s to move away from to learning to read with a whole word method. It is common sense, backed by research, that learning to read alphabetic languages should always begin with learning letter sounds and how to combine them to form words. If you are learning Chinese, in contrast, you can use whole word reading instruction because that language does not have individual letters whose sounds make up words. Chinese is a logographic writing system and not an alphabetic system. In logographic systems, symbols represent words, unlike letters as in alphabetic systems like English. Chinese has characters that make up whole words, and the characters must be memorized (sometimes they combine more than one to make a word). Watch this video below if this system interests you!! SO WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHONETIC READING AND WHOLE WORD READING? Let's take them one at a time: PHONETIC READING Phonics is one method used to teach reading and writing by making learners aware of the sounds of each letter. These sounds are know as phonemes. In order to read a language that uses an alphabetic system, you have to learn to hear, identify and manipulate those phonemes. Those phonemes are seen in spelling patterns, which vary from language to language. When learning to read, students are taught a correspondence between those sounds and their spelling patters (also known as graphemes). Graphemes represent a single sounds but can be one letter or many letters (e.g. /c/ in cat, /st/ in stop, /ight/ in light). To put it simply, phonics as a reading method is a MUST as the foundation for alphabetic reading. Click here for an article that explains it clearly and describes the pitfalls of whole word reading. You don’t want to subject your child to guessing when faced with words they have never seen. We all will add whole word reading to our armor, simply by seeing words many times in our lifetime. Knowing many words by site helps us tackle the longest book we ever read in the shortest amount of time. However, even as adults we will face words we have never seen and employ our tactic of phonetically breaking down the word then reading on….of course only after ‘googling’ its’ meaning (haha!). Watch this short video below for a fun tactic for helping your child perfect their reading with the phonics method. Leigh Ann Dutton makes other videos about different aspects of being an intentional, Christian mom. Check her out and subscribe like I did! WHOLE WORD READING AND ITS’ DEFICIENCIES The whole word reading method bypasses the learning of individual letters and groups of letter sounds in favor of memorizing entire words. The problem with this method as a foundation for learning to read alphabetic scripts is that a child will encounter many words in their lifetime that they have yet to memorize. Obviously, vocabulary expands as the level of books increases. It is nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of words to be memorized in an alphabetic script. The video below shows how whole word reading actually negatively affects the brain. The stress involved with not having the tools to dissect words yet to be memorized also affects children's self confidence when learning to read. There are also studies that have show an increase in dyslexia when using a whole word approach with an alphabetic writing system. Click here and read page 71 of this scientific text if you are interested in the correlation between dyslexia and a whole word approach when to learning to read an alphabetic script. LORD, PLEASE GIVE US INSIGHT AND WISDOM ON METHODS TO USE WHEN TEACHING OUR CHILDREN TO READ WITH CONFIDENCE AND SUCCESS. OUR NUMBER ONE GOAL IS THAT THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO READ YOUR WORD IN ORDER TO GROW IN THEIR KNOWLEDGE AND RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU, ALONG WITH BEING PREPARED FOR EVERY GOOD WORK!
1 Comment
Esther
2/5/2021 01:50:04 pm
Thank you lovely lady this came right as I am making a big push to teach reading :) loved it!
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