Why Wait? Literally (or is it Literacy?) from the Mouths of Babes!

Start Early!! Why wait? Start with oral language, encourage interest in letters, then speech to print (sound to symbol correspondences) to teach blending and segmenting!

A few things crossed my desktop this week, but NOTHING compares to the birth of a new granddaughter, which also occurred this week!! That’s number 3 for me. Molly will be joining her older brother, Caleb (20 months), and her older sister, Jeri (almost 3 1/2). So ‘you-know-who’ got to babysit for a few days with Grandpa while the parents were otherwise occupied. We were glad to be called in to help.

As I am a former teacher and camp counselor, we engaged with the littles in a pretty structured fashion—you know the drill…, story time, arts and crafts time, snack time, music time, playing outside time, cooking time, and of course, clean up time. A lot of singing, a lot of food, and a lot of noise! It was a fun time

One of the things I did was make cards to welcome the new little sister and her mom upon their arrival home from the hospital.

I participated in the most amazing thing!

Before I share, I want to also share why I truly believe it is best to start on the road to literacy early! The earlier the better!

CATCH THEM BEFORE THEY FALL

Joseph Torgesen wrote a seminal article of the same title (Catch Them Before They Fall) way back in 1998 in The American Educator. I cannot recall a professional development session I conducted for teachers of students of all ages when I did not share this article. These are some of Dr. Torgesen’s wise words:

As one of the Moderators of the FaceBook Group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College, I often come across posts from teachers and parent alike, asking questions about the reading research, as well as more practical ways to work with students of all ages.

Most recently, a teacher asked, “Can anyone find out how much longer it takes to ‘catch students up if they need remediation and don’t get it until mid-elementary school or even later?” It was a great question prompted by this teacher’s desire to convince her school administrators to adopt a curriculum aligned to The Science of Reading. I answered the question to the best of my knowledge, citing what I thought was Dr. Sally Shaywitz’s famous quote: “It takes 4 times as long to remediate a reading problem when it is caught after 4th grade.”

Another respondent cited the shockingly true information:

** ‘’It takes four times as many resources to resolve a literacy problem by Year 4 than it does in Year 1″ –Debbie Hepplewhite This quote originally came from Drs. Reid Lyon and Jack Fletcher in 2001!

** “The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that it takes four times as much assistance to improve a child’s reading skills if help is delayed until Year 4 than if it is begun in the kindergarten year.” This quote came from Drs. Susan Hall and Louisa Moats in 1999!

** “A child with a reading disability who is not identified early may require as many as 150 – 300 hours of intensive instruction (at least 90 minutes a day for most school days over a 1 – 3 year period) if he is going to close the reading gap… between himself and his peers. And, of course, the longer identification and effective reading instruction is delayed, the longer the child will require to catch up.” This quote is a direct one from Sally Shaywitz’s Overcoming Dyslexia in 2003 (1st edition).

This is CRAZY since nearly a quarter century has gone by and we are still talking about this????

SO BACK TO THE AMAZING THING I WISH TO SHARE AND WHY SHARE IT??

So…I decided to perform an experiment—granted it was a very small sample size of just one little girl.

As Jeri and I were making a card while her little brother napped, I decided to show her this:

Jeri can identify all upper case letters and many lower case letters. She is also able to match the correct sound to nearly all consonant letters. She showed an early interest in letters (prior to age 2). No one taught this little girl in any formal manner. So, I pointed to the top word, ‘pop’.

I said, “When you see this letter (pointing only to the first ‘p’), what sound does it make you think about?” Jeri said, “/p/.”

I next said, “When you see this letter (pointing only to the ‘o’), what sound does it make you think about?” Jeri looked at me, watched my mouth closely as I said /ǒ/. Jeri repeated the sound.

I next said, “When you see this letter (pointing only to the last ‘p’), what sound does it make you think about?” Jeri said, “/p/.”

I modeled /p/ /ǒ/ /p/, and said, “What word is this?” I modeled it a couple of times. Jeri watched my mouth intently. And Jeri said, “pop!”

I almost fell out of my chair, truly. I continued on with the other two words, ‘DaD” and “PoT”. I only drew the pot after Jeri told me the word. And I drew it because I had made a big pot of soup earlier in the day and so we talked about it. She again, looked at my mouth quite intently repeating the short /ǎ/ a couple of times. I think all of this took about 4 minutes.

We practiced it again the next day–again just for a couple of minutes. Guess who recalled her sounds (phonemes) like a champ? Guess who could blend the sounds into words? You guessed it.

WHAT STRIKES ME MOST

A few things…

Notice I did NOT say, “What sound does ‘P’ make?” Instead I said, “When you see this letter (pointing to the letter), what sound does it make you think about?” This is a subtle, but important difference since after all, letters do not make sounds, right?

Notice Jeri looked intently at my mouth positions to help herself differentiate between the two short vowel sounds.

Most important thing to notice is that I share this exercise NOT to emphasize how intelligent my granddaughter may be, but rather to have you, my dear readers, truly think about the statement below:

Why it is that we have so so many young and older students who simply cannot crack the code that is our English language?

This is the conundrum we are still living through. I have been thinking about it ever since I witnessed my granddaughter’s ability to participate in early literacy so easily.

Parents and teachers, you have the power to change this trajectory. Look back at the very first sentence of this blog, which I have repeated below:

Image from Canva

The teacher who posed the question shouldn’t have had to look for the information to share with her administrators. Many in the educational community have known about how the human brain learns to read and spell for decades!

A FINAL NOTE: LET US NOT FORGET ABOUT VOCABULARY AND COMPREHENSION

BUT, we must realize that recognizing letters and sounds does not make a reader nor a speller nor a writer. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. The ultimate goal of spelling and writing is written composition so that ideas can be shared with others forever.

To that end, I wanted to share a resource I came upon just today. It is from a daily email I get called FeedSpot. Librarian Maria Trivisonno wrote a blog entitled The Art of Early Literacy Asides in Storytime. Check out these gems for ideas when you read to your young ones:

1 – Touch the text! Run your finger under the words as you read aloud.

2 – How about teaching vocabulary while you are reading.

3 – Provide kid friendly definitions of words.Knowing shapes helps young ones learn their letters since letters are made from different shapes.

4 – Have children know how to hold a book and also to turn the page when you are finished reading (my add).

Here is a template mentioned in the blog from Ohio Ready to Ready entitled “Anatomy of a Storytime Literacy Message: Research, Encouragement, and Ideas in 60 Seconds of Less.” “Check it out for more ideas. Keep talking and singing with children. It will make learning to read much easier!!

Let’s get more children on the right track so that we can minimize the numbers of children who need to ‘catch up’. Why wait? Watch and enjoy literacy literally emerging from the mouths of babes!