Reading Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard! (Or cost anything.)

Are you a teacher or a parent who’s searched online for something like, How to Teach Reading?

If so, you’ve probably seen what seems like hundreds of options for things to buy: “How To” books, year-long curriculum guides, letter/sound flash cards, lists of sight words (also with flash cards), colorful phonics materials (with matching books), plastic letters – and more, more, more.

Your head spins and your confidence drops. It’s all so complicated! Which ones should I buy?

The answer is easy — don’t buy anything!!

You don’t need any of those things. You already have everything you need: The child’s ability to tell you what’s on their mind.

You just need to know how to use it.

Instead, just say to yourself, Wait-A-Minute! This child can talk – and that’s an incredibly complex skill — maybe more complex than reading.

Forget about buying anything.

Instead, take a minute and ask yourself:

 How does a child learn to speak? And can they do the same with reading?

I’m here to help you answer those two basic questions.

How a Child Learns to Speak

First, studies of speech acquisition give us some insight into how a child develops speech. And it’s not through memorization. No one is there with curriculum guides or any other special materials.

We humans have brains equipped to carry out a much more powerful strategy. It goes like this –

      Children are natural mimics! 

They easily absorb

And copy what we do,

If they find it interesting.

So, with speech, we adults

Emphasize (model) words of

Special interest to the child.

The child then absorbs and copies

What they see and hear us doing —

IF they find it interesting.

This strategy is what we might call instinctive. For these studies found that same strategy in different countries and across various cultures. So, I’ve come to think of it as the child’s natural learning strategy.

Don’t take my word for it – think about what you already know. Everyone knows how easily a young child “picks up” a second language – just be being immersed in it. And the child does this again and again with all kinds of other things. In fact, they’re so good at copying us — that as anyj parent knows — we have to be careful what we say and do around a young child.

Given that the child has this powerful capability, can we use it to help them learn to read/write?

The answer to this is Yes! And it makes learning to read and write much easier and more enjoyable for you and for the child.

So, after many years of working with children to figure it out, I’m here to show you how to do that.  For I’ve found we just need to be a little more intentional about helping a child develop literacy skills than we are with speech.

I’ll describe it very briefly here, then you can find much more detailed directions in other parts of this website.

How to Use the Child’s Natural Learning Strategy with Reading/Writing

The first thing to do is help them see what print is for. And we do that by showing them how their own “talk” looks, written down. This captures their interest and imagination – and they want to do it, too.

So, here’s how to do that. Get them talking about something they find very interesting and help them choose one, two or sometimes three words that represent what they’re thinking about. Say they’ve been talking about the family dog, Bella, and asked for her name. You write Bella on paper sturdy enough that they can carry it around with them for a while. (At home, you might use a recipe card, at school, a card cut from chart paper.)  

This is their Key Word, and in seeing this, they now they understand that “print is talk written down.”

Let them play with their word – telling Bella about it, putting it in her bed and by her bowl, maybe attaching it to her collar for a while, etc.

With this experience, they’ll probably remember that word again the next day. (This is not yet reading – it’s more like remembering the entire experience.)

So, do it again that second day — with something else they have on their mind. Then on the third day — if they’ve really talked about something of heart-felt interest and played with the word card — they’ll recognize both words. (If not, just casually set them aside and toss them later. We only want the child collecting words they immediately recognize.)

So, they play with only ONE new Key Word a day. And from there, you very gradually begin to model some part of what you’re doing as you write. Then, when they’re able to draw, you have them glue a duplicate of each day’s word into their “writing book” and make a picture of it.

These writing books — which start out as 5 blank pages — serve as the child’s self-written, pre-primers. They’re a perfect match for the child – and much less expensive than professionally published pre-primers.

As time goes on, the activities they carry out in their writing book gradually become more complex. For this, you take them through a series of follow-up activities for their Key Words — structured by what I call The Steps.

So, at their own pace, they begin to copy and practice increasingly complex parts of what they see you doing as you write.  With this, they’re eventually able to write on their own.

So, Key Words and The Steps are at the center of a comprehensive writing/reading program that gives a child a strong foundation of phonics, sounding out words, letter formation, punctuation, capitalization, reading with expression, and more.

For how to do this, including a link to videos showing how to move a child into books, see two sections on the website: The Write/Read and the Phonics section.

Please leave a comment or question here. I’ll be answering questions and posting more about this approach here.