Welcome! I’m Janet Kierstead — here to show you how to make it easy for a child to learn to read and write. First, you’ll see how to begin by showing them how their own “talk” looks in print. Then you’ll see how you also develop phonics, letter formation, spelling, and more — as you write their words for them.
Approaching reading through the child’s own words takes the struggle out of learning to read. Why? Because young children learn by building on what they already know and find interesting. And the words they speak fit that description better than anything else — thus capturing the child’s interest.
Young children are also like sponges. They absorb information and ideas with ease. Finally, they’re also natural mimics, so they’ll copy what they see and hear us doing. But that only happens when the child finds what we’re doing interesting enough to capture and hold their attention.
When we capture their interest, they copy us so spontaneously that — as any parent can tell you — we have to be careful what we say and do around them. I refer to this ability to absorb and copy as the child’s natural learning strategy and use it to develop literacy skills. Here, briefly, is the strategy we support by using this approach —
A CHILD’S NATURAL LEARNING STRATEGY
A young child will spontaneously Absorb and Copy
what we do — if they find it Interesting.
Studies* of speech acquisition show that we use that natural strategy to help a child learn to speak. Following is how to capitalize on that natural learning strategy to develop literacy skills — using Key Words** and The Steps.
Key Words Support a Child’s Natural Learning Strategy
First, prompt the child to talk about something they find especially interesting. It could be something they love, fear, want, or simply find fascinating.
Then help them decide on a word (or two) to represent what they’ve said. That will be that child’s Key Word** for the day.
Let’s say it’s ice cream. You write ice cream on sturdy, card stock. (At home, a recipe card will do. (At school, the card is chart paper, cut to a small size. See materials.)
You say each letter’s name and/or the sound it’s making as you write. Once written, have them trace over the letters with the index finger of their writing hand. Then, casually say the letters again as they trace. By doing that, they’re already beginning to absorb phonics and copy letter formation.
Next, help them place the Word Card on a metal Word Ring. Finally, make a duplicate of their word — on light-weight paper.
Then, with their new Key Word and duplicate in hand, the child leaves you to do something with their Key Word. What they do, depends on The Step they’re working on.
The Steps Develop the Skills Needed to Read & Write
The difference between using the Child’s Natural Learning Strategy with speech vs with print is how we handle skill development. With speech, we model in the same way as we do with Key Words. But then we must stand back and wait until the child begins to speak. But with reading and writing, we ensure the child’s skill development, using a series of follow-up activities for Key Words — referred to as The Steps.
For example, when the child is just beginning, at Step 1, they make a picture about their Key Word in their writing book. Then they glue the duplicate of the Key Word under their drawing. Next, at Step 2, they’ll also dictate a sentence to go with their Key Word. That allows us to model more about writing. Then, weeks or months later, they’ll reach Step 3. There, we write the duplicate of their word and sentence on long narrow strip of paper, so they can cut it up into the separate words. Following that reassemble it. That’s where their writing skills begin transferring to reading.
They continue incrementally through to Step 6, where they can read and write independently and begin project learning. (See pictures of the full progression, by following the link to The Steps at the bottom of this page.)
Children Create Their Own First Reading Books
Each day the child does their Steps activity, they fill up one page in their 5-page writing book. So before long, they have a collection of books they can “read” (from memory) to family and friends. Doing that repeatedly, they begin recognizing sight words and other words they often say. And they’re learning to “sound out” unfamiliar words, using their phonics skills.
They continue to create these books and practice reading as they share them. So in effect, they’re writing their own reading books/basal readers. Children a very proud of these books and enjoy reading them alone or to others. And, of course, the vocabulary and topics in them are much better suited to the child than anything a parent or school district could buy.
Using this approach, you’ll find the child learns to read and write simultaneously, and they do it in about the same amount of time it usually takes a child to learn just to read. Further, they do it with the same pleasure and ease as they learn to speak.
As a result, using Key Words and The Steps, there’s no struggling, fidgeting, refusing to work, and no tears. Since absorbing and copying others is how nature has equipped the young child to learn, you’re using their energy, instead of fighting against it.
That makes learning to read and write using Key Words and The Steps much easier and enjoyable for the child — and for you!
NEXT —> SEE HOW THE STEPS ENSURE SKILL DEVELOPMENT
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*Studies of speech acquisition find we help a child learn to speak by modeling words of particular interest to the child. And through my decades of working with young children, I’ve found they’ll do the same with learning to read and write. However, we usually need to be more intentional about developing literacy skills than we are with speech. So I’ve developed The Steps to do that.
** Sylvia Ashton-Warner developed this concept. She described them in her book, Teacher, as the “captions for a child’s mind picture.”
