Reading, Reading, Reading…
We do not know about you, but we get so overwhelmed by the vast amount of reading curriculum out there! How does a parent find the right one?
In addition to the sheer volume of choices, there is that ever nagging question of, “what if I mess up?” What if the way you choose to teach your child to read ruins them for the rest of their life?
After all, government and private schools have “certified” teachers teaching the children that attend those institutions, yet week after week another news story breaks that the reading comprehension level of American school children is dropping.
If the qualified experts cannot teach children how to read, what hope do you have?
Reject these labels and these fears. The notion that there is such a thing as an “expert” for your child is false. Well, unless you are talking about the persons who came together to form them in the womb, the persons who changed their diapers, taught them to walk, talk and sang them back to sleep after a nightmare.
Who are these experts? Do they have names? We do not know about you, but we always called the two experts, Mom and Dad.
Didn’t you?
No human knows our children better than we do. No expert. No person with fancy certificates on the wall or letters after their name. No one.
There is no one who is better qualified than you to teach your children.
No one wants more for your children than you. No one. Do not be fooled by fools in “experts” clothing. They are only consistent at getting things wrong.
So, moving on from that serious question, let’s ask another one.
Why is it that “regular” teaching methods seem to fail child after child?
Before we go into their method, we will take a look at some of the genuine problems English does have.
English has a math problem.
The first problem is that English does in fact have a math problem. Bear with us, we are not nuts!
English is an amazing language. We have the largest vocabulary in the world. But, the way we got that vast vocabulary is through change, and lots of it.
In ancient times, English would have actually been several different dialects of Gaelic. When the Romans invaded, they brought with them their alphabet. This alphabet (a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, and z) was very helpful in expanding the English vocabulary, as before they had used a runic alphabet, which is made with straight lines. This form of writing limits the amount of different characters a written language can have, therefore it results in a relatively small vocabulary.
Over the centuries, England continued to be invaded by other countries and each time they were invaded, the language grew both in sounds and words.
At one point, there were dozens or even hundreds of spellings for the very same word! So many different accents existed and everyone just spelled things the way they sounded. It was a bit of a mess.
Naturally, the king of England had a solution. Everyone had to spell things his way. So, about 500 years ago, scribes were tasked with the job of standardizing the English language.
Today, we are fairly close to how words were spelled 500 years ago. Although, in America we do differ in some of our spellings just to make us seem a bit different.
So, now we get to the math problem.
Over the many years of invasion and vocabulary expansion, English settled down to having about forty-five different individual sounds.
If you do a quick count of the alphabet, however, you will see the problem. We only have twenty-six letters in our alphabet.
If it was a math problem, it could read like this:
If a language has 45 sounds, but only 26 letters to represent those sounds, how do you make 45 fit into 26?
So, how do we?
Our ancestors decided to take a two step approach to the problem.
1. Have certain letters represent more than one sound.
2. Have teams of two or more letters join up and represent one or more sounds together.
Basically, think of it this way, in our math system, we really only use ten individual digits ( 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) to represent any number we ever want to use. A number is a specific amount or quantity of something that we represent with one or more digits. For example, the number 102 uses the digits 1, 0, and 2 to represent the specific number, 102.
Now, in English, our Latin alphabet functions in that way for us. We take letters and then assign them one or more sounds. But, we still do not quite make it all the way to that forty-five sounds number we are working towards. So, letters team up and together they represent one or more sounds.
Terminology can be a confusing rabbit hole to go down, but let’s get a little Latin out of the way just so we can move on feeling a bit more like we are super smart because we are using fancier words.
A phoneme is an individual sound we make. It can also be called a phonetic sound.
A phonogram is a picture of a sound. We speak a lot of words, and obviously we need a way to represent those words on paper when we want to write something down.
We have a sound based language, which is one of the reasons it can have such a large lexicon. (See, I said we would get some fancy words in there.)
If English was a picture based language, like Ancient Egyptian or even modern Asian languages, its vocabulary would be quite a bit smaller. There are only so many pictures that the brain can memorize.
(Remember that point because it is going to be important later.)
Letters, then, are like digits in math. They are rearranged into every word in our language.
A letter or letter team becomes a phonogram (a picture of a sound) when it is being used to represent a specific sound or sounds. Sometimes, letters within these teams appear to just be silent. However, remember, our language has undergone a lot of change. Many of these so called silent letters are actually retained to give us a clue of the word’s origin.
In order to be able to take eye exams and spell things out loud, we have also assigned names to the letters. Just remember, though, that the names of the letters mean nothing in terms of helping a child to read.
The names are important, but not for reading. In fact, the alphabet song is probably one of the most common place and damaging aspects of children’s shows and toys in terms of pretending it is somehow important, even essential, for the skill of reading.
So, why do “expert” teaching methods fail to teach children to read well?
English is a wonderful language. It has the ability to absorb new words from other languages almost without any effort! That is why it has the largest vocabulary in the world.
Many people get frustrated with English because, as children, they are given a puzzle box marked “English” that is missing some or even most of the pieces, and are then told to put it all together into a perfect picture. This is an impossible task, which results in the children feeling like they are the broken ones. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Others blame English itself for being inconsistent and illogical. This too is incorrect. Most of the time, English is quite logical. The problem lies in the teaching methods, not the students and not the language.
First, a living language is not math. Math is built into our universe by a Creator God. He established the world to run on a certain set of consistent principles. Man did not invent math. Man merely rediscovered knowledge that God built into our universe and openly shared with His creations when he walked through the garden with them.
Language is something God gave us as well. In fact, that is something that has truly stumped evolutionists. Because they have recently discovered that there are places in our brain especially designed for speaking and reading. Something that completely contradicts the very basis of evolution.
Man has been speaking and reading fluently from the beginning. In fact, we originally had one language. That too is something that evolutionist greatly dislike about reality.
Instead of languages independently cropping up all over the world as man supposedly evolved, history shows us that all languages actually emerged from one master language some 4,000-6,000 years ago. For followers of Christ, this causes no surprise or alarm because we know that we did have a master language until the Tower of Babel. Since then, language has also fallen under the curse of sin. That is the reason we face a language that does not always seem to make sense.
English, however, still has a wonderful track record if certain concepts are taught.
If a teacher tries to teach English as though it were math, they are going to fail the student.
English is a living language. It is spoken by millions of people across the world, and it absorbs accents, phrases and traditions from each culture it touches. This means it is subject to change, but that is one of the true beauties of English.
Some curricula teach that English has rules, but we disagree with that terminology. A rule is something that is true 100% of the time, and that is just not a fair request of a living language. Instead, we prefer to call them patterns. Patterns are true most of the time.
English has two main categories of patterns:
1. Sound Patterns
2. Spelling Patterns
Some curriculums would call the sound patterns, phonograms, and, the spelling patterns, rules. But as we said, the term “rules” just sets people up to have unfair expectations from English.
Unfortunately, reading only seems to be taught two ways in American schools and American curricula.
- The Stupid Way
- The Long Way Around Way
Government schools and most private schools teach reading the stupid way. Which is terribly funny, in a dark humor kind of way. What we mean by “stupid” is that they take a language, which is based on sound, and they teach it as though it were a picture-based language.
Here is an example:
The teacher shows a picture of a cat, and then they show the word, “cat.” 🐈⬛ = cat
When they do this, they are asking the student to memorize those three letters as though they were a picture of the word, “cat.”
Furthermore, by using a picture to give the student a clue to the word, they are activating the child’s visual side of the brain rather than the sound side.
So, yes, the student will quickly memorize the word, “cat,” because they’re just asking him or her to access his or her visual memory.
But, if a teacher showed him or her the word, “act,” without any picture attached, he or she will have no idea how to sound it out even though it contains the same three letters.
The teacher didn’t teach the student to read the sounds of the letters. All the teacher did was to ask him or her to memorize a picture of a word.
Our brains can only retain so many pictures before it is filled up. That is one of the reasons this method is so damaging. At first, the child appears to be reading well, when, in fact he or she is just accessing his or her visual memory which will at some point fill up.
At this point, the child’s reading scores start to plummet because he or she lacks the skills necessary to sound out words he or she has never seen before or words that have no picture that can be attached to them.
What picture would you put with the word “and” or “am” or hundreds of others? It cannot be done. More importantly, it doesn’t need to be done.
Dyslexia is not an inherited condition. It is a caused condition. Caused by ridiculous teaching methods that confuse the hemispheres of the brain.
A school superintendent was visiting a struggling school one school day. She took a seat in an elementary school classroom during the reading lesson. The teacher asked the student to read the passage in the book. The struggling student hesitated with every word, not sure if she was reading it correctly. The teacher calmly told the student to use the pictures in the book to help her guess what the words were. The girl guessed the next word was “pony” and the teacher smiled and let her continue. The superintendent looked at the passage. The word was “horse.” She was very alarmed because the word “horse” and the word “pony” are not the same. What were they doing to these poor kids? After all, what will the students do when they get to college? Many of those books will not have pictures!
Most English teachers have the easiest job in the world. Anytime they don’t understand something, they just get to say, “Oh, well, that’s an exception.”
Oh, my. What a cop out!
The second method is what we call the “long way around method.” This method is generally the one used by classical schools. Points to them, they are trying to give kids a total picture of the language. Our main issue, especially where younger children are concerned, is that this method creates frustration because it wants to cram a lot of information into the student’s mind before it gives them the tools to start reading actual words.
When a child knows he or she is supposed to be learning how to read, but it takes months and months before he or she gets to actually read words, it becomes very frustrating to him or her.
So, basically, we are trying to take the long way around method, and create some strategies to get children to the reading part a little faster without sacrificing the foundational knowledge that they absolutely need to have.
This guide is designed with a weekly format which includes 5 individual lessons for each week. If your actual pace through the guide is slower or faster, do not be alarmed. Go at your child’s pace.
Comprehension is the goal, not completion. Giving a certificate of completion to children who have not actually fully comprehended the material is cruel and deceitful.
But, we are sure you desire the very best for your child, so your goal is comprehension. Make that your mantra, “Comprehension not scheduled completion.”
Your child will get there; rushing is not required and will actually deter the child from wanting to learn.
You want him or her to finish with comprehension of the subject and still have his or her natural love of learning intact!