Emergent Literacy: Playing with Language!

Learning to read and write are arguably the most important accomplishments that young children make during their early childhood years. Knowing this, many parents begin working with their child on these processes at home using the tools and techniques that they remember best from their schooling experience. For example, many parents devote hours to helping their child "learn the letters" or "write their name" before heading off to Kindergarten. Although these are important skills to learn, parents and educators must ensure that they are introducing literacy skills in a developmentally appropriate sequence. After all, becoming literate is just as much of a developmental process as learning to walk; there are several different phases a child must go through before they are truly independent with either!

Children first begin learning about reading by observing. They watch as parents and other trusted adults read to them, write notes, write their name, and so forth. After countless hours observing, they work up enough courage to being "playing with language" on their own.

Their language play will be based on the 3 main dimensions of literacy: reading, writing and speaking. Following are some specific examples of how children "play" with each of these processes to learn.

Writing Play:

• Scribbling
• Drawing people (You've got to love those large heads with no neck or body!)
• Drawing familiar shapes or places (house, the sunny day, etc.)
• Writing letters
• Attempting punctuation

Speaking Play:

• Misusing pronouns (Saying "he" when they should have said "her," etc.)
• Getting the phonemes in the wrong place with longer words ("psaghetti"/"spaghetti.")
• Rhyming

Reading Play:

• Requesting for you to reread familiar books again and again and again. . .
• "Reading" that familiar book on their own using the pictures
• Making up their own story to a book using pictures

To make the anaology to walking again, when children are "playing with language" they are crawling with literacy. They are attempting to do this huge task on their own-- but, they don't have all the tools yet! This is when the rich instruction of a teacher is most needed to guide each child along to their next developmental stage!

In the book "What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction" (2002), the following components were identified as being critical to effective literacy programs in preschool and Kindergarten:

• Language development with an emphasis on vocabulary and concepts
• Understandings about the functions of print (in written language)
• Print awareness and concepts about print
• Literacy as a source of enjoyment
• Knowledge of narrative structure: Characters, setting, beginning/middle/end, etc.
• Storybook reading
• Knowledge of the alphabet
• Phonemic awareness
• Opportunities to write

When early childhood classrooms are rich with these types of experiences, literacy development can truly blossom.

Hooked on What?

I just had one of my college students ask me the other day, "Whatever happened to 'Hooked on Phonics?" Well, as far as I know, this product is still on the market. This question did give me cause to stop and think about how little we all know about teaching phonics. Many of us just learned to read without thinking twice about it. Now, if we have a child who is struggling, we aren't quite sure as to the correct order that phonics should be taught.

In my last blog, I discussed the importance of "phonemic awareness" aka: helping our children become aware of the sounds that make up words . I discussed the importance of reading and chanting poetry and nursery rhymes with your child. Phonemic awareness, after all, is the foundation of reading. This article is going to be about the second stage in teaching reading--teaching phonics. I will begin by explaining the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is just as the name implies--an awareness of sounds. Letter symbols should not be introduced at all at this stage. When for example, I say the word "sun" to a preschool child and ask them what sound they hear at the beginning of the word, I want them to say "ssssssss" and not state the letter's name. Phonemic awareness is also about where in the word the sound comes from. "Do you hear the sound "nnnn" at the beginning or the end of the word?" And, as formerly stated, phonemic awareness deals with rhyming words as well.

Phonics, on the other hand, is placing symbols to the sounds we hear in words. This is when letters are introduced. There is however a developmentally appropriate order that letters and sounds should be introduced. I will state each stage and the appropriate grade level in which this phonetic skill should be taught.

1. Once phonemic awareness is mastered, students can be introduced to consonant sounds. Yes, that's right consonant sounds. In the past, we simply began at the beginning of the alphabet and taught the letters A-Z. We even had a "letter of the week" and spent a whole week on just one letter! No wonder the students were bored and began to dislike school! We know so much more now in our research! Children need to connect letter sounds to letter names/symbols in authentic context. The director of Excel Discovery Center preschool--Molly Wilson--sent me the following as to how she introduces letters:

"We begin with the child's name; "s is for Sebasitan... /s/" and then continued with m for mommy, d for daddy, then g for grandma, friend's names, etc. We talk about them frequently and point them out with environmental print. The MOST emotional attachment is with their own name (I ALWAYS start with a child's own name!) and then others close to them. In the Excel Discovery preschool classroom, most of our little 3 year olds can say the first letter of all their friends' names. Then we can extend it to objects... like bubblegum, bat or whatever (at our house t for trains was next.)"

In Kindergarten, consonants should be taught as follows: Four consonants and then one short vowel. In this way, early on, students learn that letters form words and that all words must have a vowel. Four letters and one vowel can easily be taught in two-three week's time in a kindergarten classroom. The condition is this: STUDENTS MUST BE EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED WITH THE LETTERS! For example, instead of the teacher dictating that the letter "b" stands for "ball". She can do some phonemic awareness rhymes to get the children familiar with the sound "b," and then have each student choose what his/her "b" will stand for. Will it be "bubblegum" or "bridge", "bat" or "bull"? When a student gets emotionally involved with the letter, it can last in his memory forever!

2. Upon learning all of the consonant and short vowel sounds, students can be introduced to consonant blends. This is where we teach two consonant sounds blending together. For example, "bl" and "st". This skill is introduced in kindergarten and covered more thoroughly in the first grade.

3. Long vowels are next in line. These should be taught in the first grade. Students will learn that the vowels each have two sounds and will also be introduced to the silent /e/ as in the word "cake". Vowel/silent "e" words (v-e) are somewhat difficult for students to grasp and may take some time. When I teach this I use the little saying, "The E jumps over, bops the (a, e, i, o, or u) on the head and says, "Say your name in the alphabet (a, e, i, o, or u)!"

It is also very important in this stage that we show students there are many different ways to spell long vowel sounds. For example, did you know that there are eleven ways to spell the long "a" sound? I do not teach all of these to children at this stage, but I do show them a card that shows them all the various ways to spell each long vowel sound. In this way, students see the full picture right from the start. Below, I have listed the various ways to spell each of the long vowel sounds with sample words next to them:

Long A: a as in acorn, a-e as in made, ea as in steak, ai as in rain, ei as in reindeer, ay as in stay, ey as in obey aigh as in straight, eigh as in eight, et as in buffet, e` as in cliche`.

Long E: e as in ego, e-e as in delete, ee as in sheep, ea as in beak, ei as in ceiling, ie as in field, ey as in key, -y as in baby,

Long I: i as in island, i-e as in ice, ie as in tie, ei as in eidetic, ey as in geyser, igh as in night, -y as in fly

Long O: o as in oval, o-e as in poke, oa as in boat, ow as in tow, ou as in soul, oe as in hoe, ough as in though, ew as in sew, eau as in plateau

Long U: u as in ukulele, u-e as in mule, ue as in hue, eu as in feud, and ew as in few

4. Following teaching the long vowel that says its name and the v-e rule, we can introduce vowel teams. (ai, ay, ea, etc.)

5. Next we teach diphthongs. (oy, ow) These are teams with more than one sound. They are sometimes called "sliders" because our mouths slide from one sound to another.

6. R-controlled words are next. These are words that have ar, or, er, ir, or ur in them. For example car and bird.

7. In the second grade we move into two syllable words.

8. Finally, in the third grade we move into teaching multi-syllable words.

Why Should I Read Nursery Rhymes to My Child?

Once upon a time, a long, long, LONG time ago; every child in the land knew the words to Humpty Dumpty, Hickory Dickory Dock, and Sing a Song of Six-pence... rhythm and rhyme were a part of every child's vocabulary.

Remember those days? Do you remember those rhymes? Now journey into the present and visit today's preschool age children. Many of these children do not know the magic that comes with the rhythm and rhyme of language. They are missing the very first foundational skill of reading--phonemic awareness. Phonemic Awareness is described by the National Reading Panel as "the understanding that sounds of spoken language work together to make words.” (Reading First, 2001)

Knowing how to rhyme and discriminate sounds is the foundational piece to a child's early success with reading. We are so fortunate now to have many books today that incorporate rhyme. Many authors, including Dr. Suess, have brought us another dimension to the rhythm of language.

One of the early warning signs of dyslexia is that a child struggles with rhyming. (See the warning signs on the Excel Achievement Center website.) This is a problem associated with auditory processing. My youngest son used to struggle with this as a child. He could not decipher between the words that rhymed from the words that didn't. He also struggled with name recall--another warning sign also having to do with an auditory processing deficit. Name recall is when a child cannot remember a name of a person or object after it has been told to him repeatedly. (My son asked me what my sister's name was every time that she came over.) Since his father has dyslexia, I found it imperative to begin an early intervention with him so that he would only know success in school.

Because my son is a hands-on (kinesthetic) learner, he did not enjoy the traditional nursery rhyme books that I had used in the past with his older brother. These books did not have enough "action" for him. So, I had to take a different approach. I decided to add action to these nursery rhymes to make them come to life. The black birds would "peck off his nose"(my fingers would tweak his nose), Humpty Dumpty would really fall (I'd have him fall off my lap), and the mouse managed to climb up the clock (my fingers crawling up his arm). He and I worked really hard on rhyming together. On top of this, he also received early intervention tutoring at Excel Achievement Center.

Because early intervention methods were used with him at the early age of four, he is now a second grader reading at the third grade level. He has never struggled in school because of the interventions that we did outside of school.

Can reading nursery rhymes and poetry books completely treat an auditory processing problem? No, of course not. However, it is one way to assist children in falling in love with language and experience of reading. It is also a way to begin helping our children to love the magic that comes with the rhythm and rhyme of language.

Teaching Reading: What we know for sure!

The reading wars have been going on for decades. The grand debate of phonics vs. sight word, whole language vs. balanced literacy-- curriculums come and go. Why do we keep doing this?

The answer is simple. Great teachers are constantly discovering differences in their students. They pose questions and then seek answers. This is what life long learners should be doing. The problem arises when educators build theories on the new information discovered, without plugging it into more seasoned information. For example, once a teacher discovers that phonics isn't working for everyone, he/she finds something that does work. This is a fantastic approach and one that should be used often. The fallacy lies in then swinging over to the new approach without seeing the validity in the previous one. AKA: Phonics works for some.

At Excel Achievement Center, we have worked very hard to incorporate brain research in our studies. It is our belief that there must be a marriage between the diagnostic work done in the medical field, and the intervention work done in education. We have discovered that the reason there have been so many pendulum swings in education, is that this has not been looked at as closely as perhaps it should have been.

Now we know that children use their auditory processing (phonemic awareness and phonics), their visual processing (the ability to hold sight words in our memory), and language processing (the ability to gather meaning) when we read. Some children have deficits in one or more of the above processing abilities and thus struggle with reading.

Children with an auditory processing problem can hear things quite clearly, but have difficulty discriminating sounds. The short "e" sound may sound exactly like the short "i" sound to them. This causes difficulties in beginning reading. We know that the parieto-temporal lobe in the brain is the part of the brain that beginning readers utilize the most. This is the part of the brain that assists students with decoding (aka: "sounding out the words). When a student isn't using this portion of the brain and utilizes a different part instead, he/she will initially struggle with reading unless a teacher assists him/her otherwise. Teachers abandoned phonics and went to the "whole word" method when they discovered that some of their students had auditory processing problems. They simply didn't know that this is what it was. Students with auditory processing problems may be able to utilize their visual memories in a much stronger way and simply memorize large lists of words. The problem with this method is that if a student comes to an unknown word that is not stored in his/her memory, the word cannot be decoded. A much better approach is to strengthen the students auditory processing. (See future articles on auditory processing interventions)

When the reading wars swung to the "whole word" method, educators were able to help those with auditory processing deficits, but were not reaching those with visual processing problems. Children with visual processing issues often struggle with visual memory. They are the children who struggle with spelling as well. When these children read, they will often insert letters that don't exist on the page, or they will skip words and endings to words. Sometimes these children struggle with tracking as well and will often lose their place as they read. Their coping mechanism is that sometimes they will skim as they read and learn from context...thus the whole language method was born.

The whole language method focused on the language component of reading. It stressed the importance of the brain becoming active and being emotionally involved as it read. This too is excellent and aligns with brain research. The issue here is that children still need to be able to decode (sound-out) unknown words and build up a bank of sight words so that reading is fluent and more automatic.

The National Reading Panels research of 2000 was vital to the world of reading in education. Their research stated that an effective reading program must include: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency instruction, and comprehension instruction. This research aligns with our findings in that all three types of brain processing must be working in the proper order for a student to be most successful in the world of reading. Phonemic awareness and phonics are an auditory processing skill. Learning vocabulary and comprehending utilize both the visual and language processing parts of the brain. Fluency utilizes all three processing pieces.

How does this information help us? Now teachers can learn to decipher which aspects of the brain are not working correctly and then utilize specific interventions for that part. Now all children can learn phonics. All children can become spellers. We know this to be true from Dr. Sally Shaywitz's research utilizing the functional MRI. Her findings showed that the brain can be rewired when the correct intervention is used.

In the articles to follow, I will provide interventions for each of the three processing problems. In this way we can join together as teachers and eliminate the reading wars all together!