I was fascinated to discover information on how the importance of phonemic awareness was discovered. After World War II the U.S. Government looked for ways to ease the transition back into life for disabled veterans, including those who returned home blinded in battle. A young psychologist, Alvin Liberman, was tasked with creating a reading machine for the blind. The idea was to create a machine that could vocalize print as a finger ran over Braille letters.

Although the machine worked it proved too slow at articulating the individual sounds to resemble speech. Listeners found it impossible to join the machine’s sounds together to make any sense out of them. However, Liberman’s team of scientists had stumbled upon a new under¬standing of the reading process.

They had unintentionally identified the complicated relationship between the language that we read [letters] and the lan¬guage that we speak [sounds] and discovered one of the primary reasons it can be hard to learn how to read. Just as the blind listeners could not make sense out of the sounds coming from the reading machine, struggling readers have a hard time blending together the different sounds that make up a word.

Many young learners find it incredibly difficult to distinguish the small segments of sounds – “phonemic awareness”. Their difficulty has nothing to do with an ability to recognize the individual letters but what word they form when strung together. Well over a third of all beginning readers have difficulty identifying, discriminating, and isolating sounds.

Phonemes are the sounds that make up spoken words not the individual letters. For example, the word ‘on’ is made up of two phonemes: /o/ and /n/. We hear them as a single word because we blend the individual phonemes into a unit as we pronounce the word. Clusters of letters that represent single sounds (th, sh, oo, ough, or ck) are also important for children to be aware of. The word ‘though’ is not de-codable just by the individual letter sounds, there needs to be an understanding of the phonetic sounds too. Phonemes are not the sounds that letters make but the sounds of speech that can be represented by letters.

Effective reading instruction needs to include teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics. Helping your child to recognise the sounds the letters make and how they combine is as important as understanding the letters themselves.

If you are a parent of a young child who is learning to read you may come across a term called ‘sight words’ or ‘high frequency words’. Around 50% – 75% of all words in text material are common words that are repeated. They are found in children’s books and what we read in daily life. These words are known as “High Frequency Words” or “Sight Words”. These words include adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs.

The list was originally compiled by Edward William Dolch, PhD and published in his 1948 book, “Problems in Reading”. There are 220 words on the Dolch list and recognising them at a glance helps children to read with confidence. You can get the list easily on the internet by searching for ‘Dolch Sight Word List’.

For most of the words on the list you cannot find pictures so they need to be learned, (e.g. “if”, “the” “soon”, “but”, etc.). It is an important step in learning to read because these words are so frequent that learning them leads to more fluent and confident reading for children. It is important for a child to practice over and over again until the words are learned and this can be done in many ways. These are words that cannot usually be broken down phonetically [i.e. by their individual sound combinations] and as they appear so regularly in the English language it is quicker for children to recognise these by sight rather than trying to decode them each time.

Spot the Pairs
Create 2 small cards for each of the words on the Dolch list. Chose 10 words that the child is learning and place the 2 sets of words face down. Turn two cards over and try to find a match. If the cards match, the child should say (and spell) the word and place the two matching cards together.
If the child does not make a match, turn the cards back over. Repeat the process until all of the cards have matching pairs.

Go Fishing
Deal five cards (face down) to each player. Place the rest of the cards in a draw pile (face down). Have one person start the game. Have that person choose a word that they have in their hands and ask another person, “Do you have the word ‘xyz?’ If the person that was asked has the card, they give it to the person who asked and the matching cards are placed face up. If the person that was asked did not have that word, say, “Go Fish!” and the requester takes a card from the draw pile. If a matching pair is made that person will get another turn. If not the next player goes next. If anyone runs out of cards, they can take a card from the draw pile. Repeat the game until all the words have been found. The player with the most matching sets of words wins the game.

Word Bingo
Create 5 by 5 grids and write the common words you are working on into the grids. Create small cards with all the words and mix these up in a small bag. Draw one card out at a time. The child should read the word on the card and search for the word on their grid. They cross off the words as they are drawn from the bag. For more than one child this works really well with different word combinations on the grids. The winner is the first child who has crossed off all their words on the grid.

Get a Treat
Place a small treat e.g. a candy or sticker on each word. When the child says that word correctly they collect the treat! A special reward chart can be created to place the stickers on so your child can see their progress.

What do you do when your child would rather do anything else than read?

It can be really frustrating as a parent if your child has no interest or worse still an aversion to reading. You know that you need to encourage them to read to improve their literacy skills but what do you do when it becomes a battle rather than a source of enjoyment?

Reading is a skill just like any other. And when you do not have the basic skills then for some children trying to gain the skills becomes worse than not trying. Imagine you were learning to play tennis. How motivated would you be if the ball never went over the net? It wouldn’t be much fun would it, especially if the other player was getting stressed about it.

So the key is to relax yourself. Find ways to have fun reading in different situations. Reading doesn’t just have to be sitting down with a book.

If your child is struggling to read and is spending more time stumbling over the words try reading the book to the child first. Then let your child have a go at filling in some of the blanks that you leave. Then try taking turns reading a page or line. Make sure the book is about something that the child is really interested in. Try and find interesting facts books on a topic they enjoy such as sharks, dinosaurs or soccer. If the subject matter is interesting then your child is more likely to want to master the skills to decode the information.

There are lots of tools available online that can support your child’s reading skills whilst they are having fun. Educational games can improve language development, word recognition or spelling. Kids usually love using the computer and game based learning can be great fun as well as educational.

Ebooks that are animated and read the story aloud as the child follows the words can present reading in a different medium which is removed from the normal associations they have with sitting down to read a book. You can also let them master the tool themselves to develop their self confidence. Look out for books where emerging readers can have a go themselves and click on a word to hear it spoken, like the ones at wizz-e.com.

Try playing word games, like word snap or making words out of different letters. These can be made at home for free and introducing the fun element of play can engage a disinterested reader.

Let your child write their own stories and print them out. You could illustrate the story using images available on the internet, from magazines or let your child draw the pictures themselves. Your child will love showing and reading their books to anyone who will listen! If your child is not a confident writer, then write or type the story out for them.

If you remove the battle and encourage a love of reading using different methods your child will be developing their skills in a way that they enjoy. Just as with learning to playing tennis once one skill set is developed it encourages the desire to learn more.

I was recently reading a book about what affects literacy skills in young children and I thought I’d share some of the key research findings I came across.

The critical point that was made was that learning to read and write begins long before the school years. Research shows that the attitudes of adults who interact regularly with children have a huge influence the attitude of children learning to read (DeBaryshe, 1995; Baker et al., 1995; Spiegel, 1994). A number of factors affect these interactions, including the parents’ own attitudes towards reading, the children’s motivation for reading, the opportunities parents provide their children and how they behave, as well as the parents’ own reading and literacy ability levels.

So what does the research say? Here are a few excerpts.

Parents who believe that reading is a source of entertainment have children with a more positive view about reading than do parents who emphasize the skills aspect of reading development (Baker et al., 1997).

Children who view school learning as irrelevant to life outside school are less motivated to invest time and effort in learning to read (Purcell-Gates, 1994; Stipek et al., 1995).

When parents are responsive and ”chatty” during shared reading, improvements in their children’s skills have been recorded (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1994).

Parents who believe their children are interested in reading are more likely to provide reading activities than parents who do not see such interest (Hiebert, 1981).

Enthusiasm about reading is suggested by many researchers as a route to development of the child’s active engagement in reading (Snow and Tabors, 1996; Baker et al., 1995).

Activities such as family storybook reading promote positive feelings about books and literacy (Taylor and Strickland, 1986).

Mealtime conversation helps children acquire knowledge about narratives when family members recount the day’s activities, giving children an experience of value in learning about language and communication (Snow and Tabors, 1993).

So some simple steps can promote reading skills in your children:
• talk to your children,
• share books,
• be enthusiastic about reading,
• chat about the books they are reading,
• be seen to enjoying reading yourself.

Simple really isn’t it?

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