Literacy Adventures in Strawberry House
"Don't worry about it, they'll learn through exposure!" [supervillain voice] HAHAHAHA. You fool.
I'm gonna be honest. This year is hot garbage. I lost my dream job, my beloved cat died, my glasses got so scratched up that they triggered migraines that lasted THREE WHOLE WEEKS, the kids' daycare provider decided to close up shop so we had to scramble to find a new one. And - AND!!!!! - now the whole family is stuck at home with HAND, FOOT, AND MOUTH.
This is been my life since early July. All this happened within TWO MONTHS. Fuck this year for real.
But I've been continuing to put one foot in front of the other, and there are a few aspects of my life that are still bringing me pure joy and excitement. One is working on this project. I'd never thought of myself as much of a writer - I got good grades in English class throughout school, but that's not the same thing as having something to say and being good at saying it. This is the first time that I've felt like I have a worthwhile original analysis to write about, and I've been having a great time working on it.
The other big one (the one I actually want to focus on today) is that I've been teaching my older kid, A, to read! It's been SO exciting watching them get excited about building new skills and beam with pride when they can read a difficult new word. I'm looking forward to them becoming a fluent reader. The whole world really does open up at that point!
Today, I wanted to talk about how we're tackling learning to read in our house. I did a ton of reading about The Science of Reading and various models of learning for my article on the literacy crisis. I've been using a lot of those concepts to design individualized lessons for A's specific learning style, and it's been such an engaging and fun process for us both!
chorui halim
So A is 4 years old - a great age for dipping their toes into reading, for sure. I've been feeling a little guilty, though, because A showed all the signs of reading readiness (desire to read, understanding letter-sound correspondence, strong listening comprehension, print awareness, and phonological awareness) way back at 2 and a half years old. I had the impulse at that point to start teaching reading in a more structured way, or at least have bedtime storytimes more consistently, but it didn't happen. K was still a newborn, I was still working part-time to stretch my parental leave... I just couldn't manage to get started, even as A begged to read more. Instead, A ended up watching a lot of TV. A lot of TV.
But since the kids' daycare closed and I've been on my sabbatical, A and I have been spending a lot of time together. I instituted a no-TV-during-business-hours rule, which lasted all of a week before the HFMD hit. But that week was really all we needed to get started with our reading routine!
Here's what I've been using to teach:
- Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Engelmann, Haddox, and Bruner
- Bob Books - we have sets 1 through 4, but we've only used set 1 so far.
- Homemade picture books inspired by Bob Books
- A variety of games and songs that I keep making up as we go
... and here's my reasoning behind each choice.
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
This book is amazing. Like it says in the title, it presents 100 lessons that gradually teach phonological awareness, letter-sound correspondence, and basic comprehension skills. Each lesson is designed to take 15-20 minutes. They're very intuitively laid out and don't require any prior scientific or pedagogical expertise from the person guiding the child through the lessons. (But it is fun to be able to catch why they're doing what they're doing!)
The approach to reading instruction used in this book is an extension of Direct Instruction, which is one of the most heavily researched educational models in the world. Though the evidence clearly shows that it's a highly effective model, "it was (and continues to be) criticized for being dogmatic, utilitarian, and authoritarian, with opponents claiming that its tightly structured scope and sequence leave little room for teacher and student creativity." (From this 2021 journal article.)
I have noticed the drawbacks of the high structured design. We're on lesson 23/100, and A gets pretty bored pretty quickly now. We were doing 3-4 lessons a day when we started (NOT generally recommended, but it's what A wanted to do). The novelty has worn off and sometimes it's a struggle to make it through the full 20-minute lesson. However! There are a lot of other strategies I use to make the process more engaging, which I'll go over in detail in a little bit. The last thing I want to do is make reading lessons boring or painful.
But arguably the most important part is that it works really well. Or at least it has for us so far. A can recognize about a dozen phonemes, and they've been doing a great job at learning rhymes and blending sounds while reading. Rhyming and blending were two major concepts I was having a really difficult time teaching them. That is, before we started this book.
I'm definitely slowing down the pace of our lessons, especially now that we're sick, but I'm confident that they'll continue to be amazing. Also have to mention that this book was first published in 1983; we've been using the revised 2022 edition. Definitely a point in favor of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Bob Books
I remember my mom checking out tons of Bob Books from the library for us when I was a kid. They're decodable books: they start out using easy words with a very limited set of letter-sound correspondences before slowly branching out. The point is for kids to be able to sound out the words themselves instead of relying on guessing, looking at the pictures, or other cueing strategies.
Bob Books have come in really handy when A needs a break from the 100 Easy Lessons book. They offer something a change of pace, and despite their simplicity, they even incorporate some level of story structure (exposition, conflict, resolution). Bob Books are great for developing print/book awareness: starting with the front cover, learning to read from left to right, turning pages correctly, identifying the end of the story. They've offered A tangible proof of their rapidly developing skills.
The only difficulties we've run into with Bob Books so far is that the letter-sound correspondences they use don't line up with the order that 100 Easy Lessons introduces them. Which makes sense - they're completely different reading systems designed by different people. 100 Easy Lessons has a ton of built-in opportunities to reinforce the letter-sound correspondences it introduces before incorporating them into larger words and sentences. That isn't the case for Bob Books. So the problem we've been running into is that A ends up shakier on the letter-sound correspondences that appear only in Bob Books and not 100 Easy Lessons. Not that it's much of a problem - a little flashcard practice goes a long way. And all we really have to do is keep chugging along, since 100 Easy Lessons does eventually cover 44 letter-sound correspondences (the same as the number of phonemes in the English language).
Homemade Picture Books
I didn't want to start out teaching reading in English. A knows four languages: Bangla, Spanish, ASL, and (Standard American) English. We primarily speak our heritage language, Bangla, at home.
My parents also worked really hard to instill Bangla proficiency at an early age. Despite growing up in the US, I was conversationally fluent by 3 or 4. The problem was that once I started school, the academic and social pressure to use English (and only English) was overwhelming. It was a constant battle with my parents. Since we spoke Bangla at home throughout my whole childhood, I retained my conversational fluency - at least until I left home at 15. I'd developed only the most basic reading and writing skills, though. Those were stuck at a kinder-1st grade level until I started taking classes as an adult.
I put a lot of energy into thinking about how to handle this situation for A and K. My strategy is to capitalize on the pre-school years as much as I can, though we did have to start sending them to daycare at 9-ish months old. (My mother stayed home with us.) For us, that involves speaking almost exclusively in Bangla at home, as well as reading Bangla books, listening to Bangla songs, watching Bangla children's shows, and video calling my relatives whenever I manage to remember.
Here's the problem. Bangla has 11 vowels and 39 consonants. Each of the vowels also has a diacritic form (that's used far more often than the pure vowel form). The consonants can also be mashed up into juktoborno - combined letters - that sometimes look nothing like their component parts. It's a more orthographically regular language than English is (fucking diphthongs, am I right?), but there's still plenty of irregularities that trip me up all the time. It's a pretty complicated language.
The bigger problem is that we don't have evidence-based systems like Direct Instruction and Bob Books to break down the complexity of Bangla. We have a lot of children's books at home, but they use a lot of different letters, big words, and complex grammar from the outset. It makes it borderline impossible to teach the rules of the language when I'm having to explain a new rule every 2 seconds just to get to the end of the sentence.
So I've been using the principles of Direct Instruction and the structure of Bob Books to make my own materials. It's a lot of work, so all I have so far is a bunch of flashcards and one little picture book. But I think it would be cool to develop this into a full curriculum. Maybe someday!
Teaching my kids Bangla is so deeply important to me. Diaspora Bangalis are often surprised by this - why bother, when I grew up in the West and don't (currently) have plans to move our family back? Bangla is the 7th most spoken language in the world: more than Portuguese, Japanese, German, Korean, or Italian. But it's spoken primarily by some of the poorest people in the world, so there are nowhere near as many resources for learning it.
For me, it's about more than just heritage. Learning about present-day Bangladesh and the history of Bengal is possible in English, but understanding Bangla is the key to overcoming the outsider/colonial perspective. Bengal has a rich revolutionary history, unique intellectual traditions, and an incredible body of literature and poetry. I grew up hearing a lot about it but being unable to access it myself. I want better for my kids - I want them to know it as their own.
Other Strategies
Mixing up techniques keeps lessons fresh and fun. A is only 4, after all. I want them to feel like learning is a joyful and interesting process, not a burden. Here are some of the techniques we use most often:
- Songs. Little melodies are some of the best memory devices out there! I made up a song for the Bangla vowel alphabet that's easily adaptable for teaching vowel diacritic forms as well, and I only realized afterward that it's the same as the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme. (Don't tell Disney.) I also use songs all the time to break tension. If A and I are getting frustrated, the easiest way to solve it is with a song and a silly little dance.
- Physical movement. Speaking of dance - it's also a great teaching tool. I taught A morphological awareness (syllables) by having them stomp/clap out words into parts. We dramatically act out the sentences we read. We do mini Jane Fonda workouts when we're getting bored.
- Cross-language reinforcement. We always go over concepts in all 4 languages. It helps makes sure that English language learning doesn't happen at the expense of all the others. It also improves comprehension: if a kid can read a story in one language and answer questions about it in another, you know they actually understand what's going on, and aren't just parroting back what they heard earlier. Using ASL throughout the reading process provides tactile feedback, as well, which engages different parts of the brain (and makes those neural connections stronger)!
- Reading in the wild. A is super excited that they can sound out words wherever they go now! Using decoding/blending skills to sound out A-L-D-I or N-A-S-A or S-T-O-P is a great opportunity to reinforce the skills we're building at home. It demonstrates the practical utility of what we're learning, too.
- Knowing when to quit. This isn't a race. There isn't a prize for learning to read at 3 or 4 instead of 6 or 7 (or later). When A says they're tired and don't want to keep going, I might push them a little bit to finish out the lesson, but if they really want to stop, then we stop. I'm highly aware of the decline of children's free time and its negative consequences. When designing and carrying out lessons, the benefits have to outweigh the harm of losing that unstructured time. The point is to build a consistent habit, and we're not going to be able to do that if A burns out. And they still get to watch plenty of TV.
So that's where we're at! I'll try to give periodic updates with more analyses of what's working and what's not. This has been such a fun adventure - I love how deeply technical and highly creative of a process teaching/learning is. We're getting pretty nerdy with it over here, and I wouldn't have it any other way.