You may be asked why you’re using Key Words with your preschooler(s) — or even challenged with that question. So, here are a few questions and replies to help you think through your own response.
Why Start With Print During the Preschool Years?
Because that’s when a child’s natural development “ripens” for working with print.
For instance, the preschool child who’s seen others writing, spontaneously begins to scribble, claiming they’ve written words. This is evidence the young child’s natural tendency is to move beyond speech and into print, once they’ve seen that as a possibility — and reached their sensitive period for print. For more on this, see the previous page on “Sensitive Periods” & Readiness.
Further, Maria Montessori, provides more evidence of this. She insisted on letting a child’s interest be the guide for their work. For she believes that as a child’s brain developed physically, it reached specific “sensitive periods” for learning a particular skill. Further, that during these times, the child would naturally be drawn toward working with materials/equipment that helped develop that specific skill.
She found this to be true with the ability to make distinctions in size, shape, number, etc. Offering children a moveable alphabet, she found they began to build words from print at around 4 years old — some earlier.
Although my strategies for exposing a child to print are quite different from Montessori’s, I have found the same timing to be true. That is, a child who’s seen speech translated into print wants write, sometime during their mid to late preschool years. (Just as a side note: I believe Montessori would have been very interested in Key Words. But very unfortunately, that concept wasn’t published by Ashton-Warner — until after Montessori was gone.)
Why Key Words?
Because Key Words are, by definition, captions for the child’s “mind pictures.” So, they’re very interesting to the child. And interest is an essential ingredient in A Child’s Natural Learning Strategy. As such, they support the child’s natural desire to communicate what’s on their mind. See A Child’s Natural Path.
Human beings are born with a strong desire to communicate what they have on their mind. The desire is so strong, our ancestors created alphabets to represent the words they had previously devised to convey their thoughts.
So, writing captions for our mind pictures is an innate tendency: Once a child can talk, they are drawn toward print, as it’s the next way for a human being to communicate their thoughts.
Further, new skills most readily attach to old learning and something of special interest. So the most powerful way for a child to learn to use print as a means of communication, is to work with meaningful print, i.e., print that represents the “mind-pictures” they have already translated into “talk.”
So, a Key Word has strong meaning for the child, and this makes it a powerful magnet for attaching writing and reading skills — such as letter formation, phonics, and comprehension. Moving ahead with Key Words and The Steps is a fail-safe, individualized process that ensures success.
We Expose Our Preschooler(s) To the Alphabet — Isn’t That Enough?
Being acquainted with the alphabet is important, but it’s not enough. (It’s being acquainted with and understanding what they’re used for that’s important, not memorizing them.)
Learning the alphabet song and playing with the names of the letters, as described in the menu item, Phonics develops a good foundation. But letters are just the bits and pieces we use to translate speech into print.
Recall that a young child learns best by seeing you doing something of interest to them. And you don’t sit around memorizing letter names and sounds. You use letters to write words, and you choose which letters you’ll use by the sounds in the words. So, that’s what you model for them.
And notice again that using print to to write their own words makes what you’re doing doubly interesting to them.
Why Not Wait Until They Go to Kindergarten?
Having a rich, strong foundation will ensure a child’s success with reading in school — and far beyond.
What I’m describing here is not the way reading is approached in every classroom. In fact, the pendulum is swinging again now — this time back toward a phonics-first approach. And you may not be able to control the reading method the child will encounter as they begin school. But developing an understanding of what print is all about, along with some rudimentary skills, a child can handle virtually any reading program.
So, they will succeed, even if the program they encounter bypasses writing. For more about this, see the pages under the section of the menu, Why Writing First? — beginning with A Child’s Natural Learning Strategy.