On the Journey to Reading

We were out for tea with my Mum one afternoon a couple of months back when we walked past some movie posters.

“Look, Noey,” said my Mum, drawing his attention to the nearest poster. She pointed at the first word. “What word is that? M-A-N,” she said, sounding out each of the letters to the word.

“Man!” said Noey. “On a ledge,” he said, reading the rest of the words.

My Mum looked at me, surprised. I shrugged. I was just as surprised that he could read the word “ledge”.

“How do you know that word is “ledge”?” we asked him.

“Because the word is ledge,” he said unhelpfully, as he bounced away to do something else which had caught his attention.

We left it as that.

I’ve been meaning to post an update on Noey’s reading progress for months but just never got round to it.

Since I last posted about trying to start him off on his reading journey, he has come a long way. At 3.5 years of age, he is currently reading pretty well, if I may say so myself. And for all my good intentions about wanting to teach him in some structured manner, in the end, practically all his learning was incidental and done in an ad-hoc manner. (That’s just me — I am so not a home-schooling mum!)

Older, more experienced parents previously told me that reading would come naturally when a child is read to a lot. While I had my doubts at that time, I have found this to be true. Noey, well, he just loves books. We regularly lug around a pile with us because we read to him at every mealtime. Mainly because he was so difficult to feed, and books were a good way to keep him seated and eating. When he was much younger, we would flip through the book and talk about the pictures to keep his attention. Then as he grew older and could focus better, we started reading the actual text. “The words!” he would demand. “Papa, read the words!” was his constant refrain on every page. It got quite annoying really!

Slowly he started picking up words from around him. “Stop” from the stop signs along the road, for example. We would point them out, and encourage him to spell the word. I also taught him a few simple words like “Go” and “Up” and “Me”, and when I came across these words in books, I would pause and let Noey read the word. It often gave him a sense of achievement.

Fast forward to today, Noey is reading competently. He reads signs when we pass them. He reads words on T-shirts. He reads the occasional headline in the papers or the words in my e-mails or twitter pages as he reads over my shoulder. He still doesn’t voluntarily read books on his own, preferring us to read to him. But when called upon, he can read long chunks of text, sometimes even surprising me with the words he can decipher. I tested him out by getting him to read Peter and Jane Book 2b – a book he had never read before – and he could read most of it himself, with minimal prompting.

Noey has a good grasp of the phonic sounds of all 26 letters of the alphabet, though he is only starting to recognise letter blends and come to terms with the fact that the rules don’t always apply.

“How do you spell “Citroën”?” he asked me one day, a few weeks back.

“C-I…,” I started.

“S! Not C!” he countered. “Citroën!” he said, emphasising the “Sss” sound at the start of the word.

I had to explain to him that “Ci” was phonetically different from its individual letters. I think he’s still confused.

At this point, Noey can blend one-syllable words well. It’s hit and miss with the two-syllable words, and I am still slowly teaching him to break up such longer words into different sections to read. For example, he was able to read the back page of this book on his own, only tripping over the word “himself”:

He was able to read “him” and “self” on his own once I covered the other half of the word with my finger in the process of showing him how to break up the word.

The benefit of having been read to widely is that his vocabulary is strong. As such, I can see that he guesses a lot of words while reading, using contextual clues after sounding out the first couple of syllables phonetically to himself. He’s actually pretty lazy when it comes to sounding out all the letters and will usually just take a stab at it using words he has in his vocabulary. Still, I think he’s doing quite well at this point and am quite proud of him.

I have set out below some of the methods/tools which we have used for teaching Noey. As I said earlier, a lot of this is ad-hoc, because I am just not diligent enough to make flashcards and follow through a consistent teaching programme. I think a lot of this is common sense, but I thought it would be useful to put down, at least for my own records so I can repeat this with Naomi in future.

Some of the things I have found helpful:

1. For phonics, Noey picked up most of his phonics from a set of old books that my neighbour passed to me. By Early World of Learning, the stories in the books involve a group of animals called the Alphabet Pals, and they teach a whole bunch of basic concepts including phonics. Unfortunately, these books are now out of print. However, the premise they employed is one that can be found in other phonic readers, namely, getting the reader to identify word that start with the same sound. eg, Danny Dog and his doughnuts, dog dish, diamond, etc. The repetition helps make the association between the letter and the sound.

2. I have left his school to re-emphasise his learning of phonics. They are using the Letterland series and it seems effective, since Noey comes home repeating stuff about Harry Hatman for the letter “H”, for example. There are plenty of resources for this out in the market.

3. On the iPad, I downloaded Montessorium Intro to Letters (and Numbers as well) on a friend’s recommendation. It teaches the phonic sounds for individual letters as well as letter blends. Noey does like it quite a bit. The clean design looks good too.

4. I got him the Bob books I had mentioned in my previous post, but Noey has spent more time playing with the iPhone app. It has the same words contained in the books, but is interactive, requiring the child to build the word phonetically. I like that it has different stages for the same page. Initially, the child is guided to put the letters together to form the word, but by stage 4, they throw in other random letters for him to choose from and there’re no prompts. The word also has to be built in the right order to stick. Not a bad app.

5. As I mentioned earlier, we taught Noey some simple words like “go” and “up”, which are commonly repeated in reading passages. I then make it a point to get him to read the word when I come across it in a book. I tried to choose high frequency words so that I would get a chance to get him to read quite often.

6. We play “guess the starting letter” games on the go. We do this quite a lot when on the road. I’d point out a tree for example and ask him what letter it starts with. When Noey gives me the wrong answer, whether deliberately or otherwise, I’d pronounce the word with the alphabet he suggested, and also with other permutations. Noey finds this very funny and we’d have a good laugh about it.

7. Building on #6 above, sometimes I would reverse it around and swop the starting letters for popular word blends and get him to pronounce/read them. Words groups like mat/bat/sat/cat or cap/gap/nap/map.

8. We play spelling games. We teach him to spell simple 2/3/4 letter words and take turns spelling them. We’ve done this very randomly. He learnt to spell “STOP” from the stop sign, and “OUT” from carpark signs. We just get him to repeat it to get it to sink in.

9. Read with him a lot!

With everything, we tried to keep it light.

This is still a work in progress. I will update more as we go along.