Thursday's Child - the science and culture of reading

Why Reading to Your Child is Scientific, not Cultural

               A situation that concerns me is the thinking that, ‘reading to your children’ is a cultural thing. This is not right. A speech-therapy teacher with a master’s degree told me about an incident she had in Texas. Hedwig was scolded by her superior for bringing books to homes and asking parents to read to their children. The supervisor explained that this linguistics expert could not force her cultural views on another, minority culture. What a misguided theory! What a disservice to the minority children of Texas!

               Part of her job is to visit children in their homes, including those who have English as a second language (ESL). What she does is similar to Parents as Teachers (PAT) workers, with emphasis on helping children with speech problems.

               She began leaving children’s books with families, knowing they would help with literacy and speech. Then her department manager called her on the carpet, saying that she had no right to push her “white culture (of parents reading to their children)” on other ethnic groups, and that she was no longer allowed to leave books with the children on her route.

               Are you kidding me?! Reading to children is “white” culture? I know plenty of people of other ethnicities that read to their children. More importantly, reading to children is scientifically proven to be the first step to literacy. Parents reading to children should not be considered a cultural aspect, but a medical one. It is a verified scientific remedy for helping children to overcome speech and language difficulties.

               “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”                         George R.R. Martin

               Bedtime stories make patterns in children's minds that help them learn to read much easier. If a doctor said that eating more chili peppers would lower blood pressure, would the reply be that he shouldn't push his culture on others? Of course not. The non-chili eaters would learn to eat chilis. All parents in every culture should be encouraged to read to their children regularly.

               If the parents can't read, they should find someone nearby who can. Who wouldn't want what's best for her child? Reading with phonics is the only proven medical cure (and prevention) for dyslexia, as cited in previous volumes of my series, It's Not Rocket Surgery!

               The manager of the speech clinic would have done much better to explain – to complaining parents – all the benefits of reading to their children, or at least of looking through the books with them. If the parents couldn’t read English, they could find a friend or neighbor who could. Or find books in their primary language. Something, anything.

               Parents could just let their children browse through the books to be familiar with printed language and book orientation. Why would parents want to hold their children back, rather than give them a good educational start? False pride? I was surprised and shocked at the manager’s rejection of the proven best-practices for success – for any culture. The Baltimore Project and the Bureau of Indian Affair's highest-performing schools, with phonics, have confirmed this. See Vol. 5 of my series, It's Not Rocket Surgery!

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3 reasons why phonemic awareness is so important

Why does the Godfrey Method promote early reading the right way?

                Research shows that the best time to start reading readiness and reading is between the ages of 2 to 5 years old, when the most brain neuron mapping is occurring. Waiting until school age loses that most crucial window of time, and may be too late for some children. Reading is the foundation of everything else. Catch this opportunity for your child.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

 Phonemic awareness is the beginning of phonics. Don’t believe the nay-sayers.

        In New Jersey’s Language Arts Literacy Curriculum Framework 1998 (reminiscent of California’s 1987 framework), the debacle of whole-language persists. In it “there is no directive for the systematic instruction of sound-symbol decoding or knowledge of other language structures. Phoneme identity, spelling correspondences, syllables, and meaningful parts of words (morphemes) are not to be the content of instruction at all, according to this document.

        “Children in New Jersey apparently are expected to read by imprinting and osmosis. Similar expectations characterize the standards of Vermont, Ohio, and North Dakota, among others.” ~ The Illusion of Whole Reading, by Louisa Cook Moats.

        The rest of her article is very eye-opening. Such as, some whole-language defenders “caution teachers that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can be dangerous, boring, ineffective, or irrelevant, and shouldn’t be overdone. Such a tone echoes even through Teaching Children to Read, the recent report of the National Reading Panel.” They couldn’t be more wrong!

        One definition of insanity is – “repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Whole-language is insanity.

        Telling the truth about the Whole-Language fiasco is not demonizing it. It was already there. We are just debunking the myths it was constructed upon. Unfortunately, the method we justifiably expose has also been similarly used in instrumental music teaching, as well as “reform” math, doing considerable damage there, too. The population's silent participation has already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching that must be overturned.

        In Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2003, he writes,

        “Over the past two decades, but particularly in the last 10 years, there has been a burgeoning consensus about the critical importance of phonemic awareness to beginning reading success, and about its role in specific reading disability or dyslexia. [One definition of phonemic awareness is] the ability to recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of individual sounds.

        “What is clear is that phonemic awareness concerns the structure of words rather than their meaning. To understand the construction of our written code, readers need to be able to reflect upon the spelling-to-sound correspondences.

        “…beginning readers must first have some understanding that words are composed of sounds (phonemic awareness) rather than of each word as a single indivisible sound stream [sight-word]. This awareness appears not to be a discrete state, but rather a sequence of development ranging from simple to complex… or from shallow to deep.”

        Marion de Lemos in, Phonics: The Building Blocks to Reading, October 20, 2004, says it simpler:

        “ There is now a consensus among reading researchers that the skills underlying the facility to read are the ability to break up words into sounds (phonemic awareness), and the ability to connect these sounds to letters or clusters of letters by a process of blending and segmentation (phonics). Without specific teaching, many children fail to develop these skills.” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2662

        According to Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development (July 26, 2001), exposure to reading should follow this sequence. Appropriate goals or targets for phonemic awareness at different ages:

Infants and toddlers:

Emotional bonding
Pleasure in book interactions
Sound of parents' voice

Two- and three-year-olds

Vocabulary and concepts
Book knowledge
Narrative understanding

Four- and five-year-olds

Print knowledge
Phonological sensitivity
Letter-sound correspondence
Emergent writing

        “The goals of one developmental period don't cease when the next developmental task begins. Thus, positive emotional experiences around books, which should begin for infants and toddlers, shouldn't stop when children reach two or three years of age and need to start learning acquiring vocabulary and concepts.”

        Did you know that parents are the proven best teachers for their preschoolers and children? Parents and early reading the right way are the keys to reversing the downward educational trend for your child. They are the recipe for preventing dyslexia. They are the simple yet effective solution.

        You may ask, "What if I don’t know how to teach my child?"

        You don’t have to have a teaching certificate to teach your child to read. In The Godfrey Method books, the parental guidelines fit on one page. They are easy to understand and easy to follow. It is vital that parents themselves do one-on-one phonics with their kids early. We provide the tools and the way to teach them properly.

        Why does the Godfrey Method promote phonics at home rather than preschool?

        Studies show that children learn best from their own parents. Children learn faster and easier from their own parents than from preschools. Preschools have their place for certain situations, but the home is the ideal place for a child to learn. Parents are their children’s best teacher. Universal preschool would be a fiasco and travesty for our children. The Godfrey Method uses a positive approach that defuses power struggles between parent and child.       

        With The Godfrey Method, parents can and should teach phonemic awareness and phonics simultaneously with reading stories, etc., almost from the beginning. I always started my children at 18 – 24 months old, with wonderful results and no downside. Put your children on the launch pad of life and watch them soar!

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