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 Imagine your adulthood without being able to figure out your bank statement, read a map, understand a real estate contract or share a bedtime story with your child. Reading is the foundation for all learning and is the one skill we use in every aspect of daily life. “If you can read, you can learn anything. You can’t do anything without reading,” says Nicholl Mauga of San Clemente, a curriculum specialist for the Santa Ana Unified School District and the parent of a kindergartner and a 2 ½-year-old. Reading is about much more than books. A child’s reading skills can be a major factor that determines his or her success later in life. Reading helps children develop a strong vocabulary, good social skills, fine writing skills, hand-eye coordination and important job skills. “Your ability to read impacts your future career,” says Dean Anderson, owner of GrowthSpurt, an after-school reading, writing and math tutoring program in Costa Mesa. “If you are going into the world and you want to be a construction worker, your reading skills are going to be much different than if you want to be an accountant or a scientist or a doctor. There’s a difference in the level of reading material you need to understand. Your ability to always be proficient for your grade level or above is critical to your success. Technology has increased the pace of new material, and the world is becoming a lot more competitive.” Lay the foundation Every child develops differently, but educators and literacy experts agree that it’s never too soon to lay the foundation for creating a strong reader. Real world experiences and interaction with language through conversations, books, games and music help babies, toddlers and elementary school students with reading. “Interacting with your children from birth in terms of reading to them, saying that things have names, the lyric quality of reading to a child – all of that helps their brain develop the skills to be successful in reading,” says Barbara Neder, family literacy coordinator for Read Orange County (readoc.org), the adult and family literacy program of the Orange County Public Library system. Neder has been a tutor and literacy specialist for more than 25 years. “Have regular conversations. Help children learn that things have names,” Neder says. “Point out words when you take the child grocery shopping. Talk about colors and shapes, and refer to words on labels and packages – connect that to the item or the picture of things. When the child sees a banana, you say, ‘A banana is yellow, this is the word “banana.” That starts with a B.’ And then make the sound.” Teachers agree that early exposure to language through a variety of everyday experiences is critical. “The most successful kids come to school with life experiences,” says Bonnie Chilton, a kindergarten teacher at Chester W. Morrison Elementary School in Menifee, located in Riverside County. “They’ve gone places and done things, even taken a walk in the park and talked about things; they’ve had a lot of interactions with life. The kids who had those types of experiences have the most to build upon at school. The more things they know, the more things they can connect to and the faster they learn.” Reading components By age 3 or 4, most children can learn the alphabet and other critical pre-reading skills like recognizing pictures, letters, sounds and signs. Most children learn to read by age 6 or by the end of kindergarten, educators say. Research shows that children must be taught five essential components so they can learn to read, according to reading experts with the National Reading Panel (nationalreadingpanel.org), which issued a major report in 2000 on teaching reading. Congress, working with the Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health, convened the panel to assess the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read. The panel found that parents, caregivers and teachers could help children learn to be good readers by practicing these five components: 1. Recognizing and using individual sounds to create words, or phonemic awareness 2. Understanding the relationships between written letters and spoken sounds, or phonics Children need to learn the sounds that letters and groups of letters make. Knowing the relationships between letters and sounds helps children recognize familiar words and “decode” new words. 3. Developing the ability to read a text accurately and quickly, or reading fluency 4. Learning the meaning and pronunciation of words, or vocabulary development 5. Learning comprehension strategies so children understand what they are reading “Every expert in reading says this is where it’s at,” affirms Jeanne Gahagan, a reading specialist and former classroom teacher who mentors new teachers and trains teacher-mentors for Riverside, San Bernardino, Mono and Inyo counties, through the Riverside County Office of Education. Gahagan notes that students who are not early readers can still become good readers within a few years with extra reading support from parents and teachers. Everyday activities It’s a challenge for busy working parents and parents in large families to provide rich life experiences for their kids, but Gahagan says even the busiest parents and caregivers can engage young children in language in practical ways. “You do practical, everyday things,” Gahagan says. You talk about the laundry, you talk about the colors. You talk about the socks and put it in a sentence: ‘I love my socks because they are so colorful.’ At the market, take your young kids with you. Talk about how you get there and discuss the foods and the colors. When you’re cooking, get those kids in the kitchen and follow a recipe and read directions with them. When you are on the road, play the license-plate game. Find a store that starts with ‘A’ and read signs. Use your environment to build in conversation and language. Speak in sentences. Model the language.” Local moms also have their own successful ideas. Santa Ana Unified School District curriculum specialist Nicholl Mauga, whose son is 5 and daughter is 2 ½, says, “I read to them all the time. We go to the library. We go to the used bookstore and buy books. We have books in baskets around the house. Even in the car we have books for when we go to get gas. We build words in the bathtub.” Mauga also likes listening to music with her children, using the “Five in a Row” lesson plans for children, having them watch the “LeapFrog Letter Factory” movie, and having her son work on his written and illustrated journal. “It gave him a love for language that carries over with his reading,” she says. Marcie Taylor of Huntington Beach, a social media and creative marketing consultant, blogger and photographer, has two young sons who were early readers: Jake, 10, and Milo, 6. Jake started reading when he was 2 and Milo at 3, and their mom says their constant exposure to reading and language at home did the trick. “I always read to them, of course, to this day,” Taylor says. “We love the library. … My husband and I are avid readers, too, so the kids were exposed to words all around them. With my older son, I labeled things in his room first with a picture and a word in red lowercase letters. For example, the truck bin had a picture of a truck and the word ‘truck.’ After a few weeks, I changed out the label to just the word ‘truck.’ You get the idea. We played lots of computer games as well, on pbskids.org and starfall.com, which teaches kids to read phonetically.” Storytime fun Another great idea is taking your child to storytime at the public library. Gloria Brison, a library associate at the downtown Riverside library, loves to oversee storytime. She has been working in the children’s program at the downtown Riverside library for 21 years, and she says her library, like most public libraries around Orange County and the Inland Empire, hosts regular storytimes for toddlers and preschoolers year-round. Attending storytime introduces books to children in a fun way and helps toddlers and preschoolers learn to socialize with others, Brison says. “Storytimes today are different. It used to be that the storyteller just told a story. Now a lot of them have interactive movement and music,” explains Brison, who incorporates colorful props, music and puppets into storytime programs at her library. Reading helps older children, too, with social skills, notes Cara Cutruzzula, who teaches eighth and 10th grade English at Brethren Christian School in Huntington Beach. “Boys at school will share books and talk about them. They are not close friends necessarily, but they will share these books with each other. I see boys talking about the Percy Jackson novels and girls talking about ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Twilight.’ It bridges a gap.” Reading with children – especially little ones – daily for 15 to 20 minutes is critical, says Dean Anderson from GrowthSpurt. When reading with a toddler or preschooler, “Find something that interests the child. Start reading out loud so they can see the words and hear the voice of the parent or whoever is reading to the child. They need to know letters, phonic sounds and numbers or symbols from pictures. They need to be able to look at a picture of a fire truck and know that IS a fire truck,” Anderson says. To check a child’s comprehension, ask questions about the story’s characters and main ideas, such as, “What do you think is going to happen next?” Neder says. She suggests taking it a step further and expanding the story and its concepts to a real-world activity. For instance, if you read your preschooler a story about cookies, go bake some cookies. In the classroom Teachers, too, should be reading to their students in class, making time for silent reading and/or regularly leading reading discussions, says Debi Oddi, a kindergarten teacher at Vintage Hills Elementary in Temecula and an elementary school teacher for 31 years with the Temecula Valley Unified School District, the Alta Loma School District and the Ontario-Montclair USD. “When you’re teaching reading, you are also developing a love of reading. It can’t be all drill and kill,” she says. “You have to model good reading as a teacher.” Oddi asks her students, “How does this book affect you? What in your life felt like that? How does it relate to your life? That’s how you check for comprehension. “I also read to my students two or three grade levels higher than their reading level,” she says. “They can understand all of that.” The best teachers aside, Oddi affirms what other educators have been saying all along: Reading starts in the home. “I hate to put it on the parents, but you have to provide experiences and you have to read to your kids,” she says. “When you walk into a child’s bedroom and find a library of children’s books, when you have parents who are encouraging them to go to the library or purchase books, when children have experiences and read about them, they already have so much prior knowledge.” ≈ ≈ ≈ 10 WAYS TO CREATE STRONG READERS • Read aloud with your children every day. Repeatedly hearing words helps little ones become familiar with words; reading with older children helps expand their vocabulary. Reading together is a bonding experience that children love. Talk as you read, and answer your child’s questions. • Grab kids’ interest by offering a variety of reading materials (fiction and non-fiction), including books, comics, newspapers, magazines, menus, poems, songbooks and fairy tales. Take children’s books and writing materials with you whenever you leave home. This gives your child fun activities to entertain and occupy him while traveling and running errands. • Use sounds, songs, gestures and words that rhyme to help your baby learn about language. Babies need to hear language from a human being, not the TV. • Have the child keep a journal of family events. The journal can include scribbles and drawings. Visit your local library often. Get your kids their own library cards. Attend a storytime or other free event at the library, and let your child select books to check out. • Take the children to the bookstore. A book or gift certificate is a terrific present. • Be a positive role model. Let your child see you reading, whether it’s the newspaper, a magazine or the latest best-seller. • Create a library at home for your child. Acquire books at yard sales, bookstores and library book sales. Set up an area at home where reading materials are within easy reach. Encourage writing, too, by including paper, crayons and pencils. • Subscribe to a children’s magazine for each of your kids that covers a topic they like. Read it with your children when it arrives in the mail, and make a big deal out of your child receiving HER mail. Sources: U.S. Department of Education, International Reading Association and National Education Foundation ≈ ≈ ≈ 5 REASONS TO TEACH YOUR BABY TO READ 1. Language proficiency develops in the brain as early as infancy. In the first year of life, your child’s brain will triple in size. It is during this period that many of the neural pathways establishing language proficiency are formed. This is why it is crucial to make the most of these early years by introducing reading as joyful play. 2. Early literacy engagement gives your baby an enormous advantage. Spending just a few minutes a day engaging your baby or toddler in literacy activities may give her a 32-million-word advantage by kindergarten over other children. In addition, early intervention with literacy activity may make your child less likely to develop learning problems such as dyslexia. 3. Early literacy activities are fun, not work. Learning to read is play for babies and toddlers. Go to YouTube and search “baby reading” to see young toddlers reading. See J. Richard Gentry’s “Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — from Baby to Age 7” for easy lessons. 4. Babies’ brains are suited to early reading. All babies have a special capacity for perceiving patterns and connecting symbols. Perceiving patterns and connecting symbols with meaning is what reading is all about. When shown contrasting word patterns five minutes a day, 2- and 3-year-olds can intuit phonics. This is true for parents who are using multimedia technology or conventional books. 5. Babies’ right-brain learning gives them special capacities for reading. Childhood education experts who have only studied school-aged children incorrectly assume that babies and toddlers must learn to read like 6-year-olds, who develop left-brain reading systems through formal instruction. Babies and toddlers under age 3 are likely to begin as right-brain readers who can pick up reading as easily as they can pick up three languages. J. Richard Gentry Ph.D. is a nationally acclaimed expert on childhood literacy, reading and spelling development, and the author of “Raising Confident Readers: How To Teach Your Child to Read and Write – From Baby to Age 7” (DaCapo/Perseus). Find out more at jrichardgentry.com. ≈ ≈ ≈ HIGH-TECH DEVICES BOOST READING Increased engagement with e-readers can increase interest in books. Technology today is well-integrated in schools, and the move to use the newest technology to promote literacy continues. Some public and private schools now use iPads or the LeapFrog electronic educational toys to augment learning, and entrepreneurs are developing new reading programs online. “There is a high interest [in e-readers], and this is a new generation,” says Debi Oddi, an Inland Empire elementary school teacher for nearly 40 years. “There are a ton of books kids can read through technology.” Cara Cutruzzula, an eighth- and 10th-grade English teacher at Brethren Christian School in Huntington Beach, knows students who regularly use mobile e-readers. “If there is a word they don’t understand, they can look it up right there. It encourages their reading, because they are tech-savvy and they feel like a techie,” Cutruzzula says. E-readers – with the Barnes & Noble Nook, Amazon.com Kindle and Apple iPad among the best known – are finding a new place on campuses. Mater Dei High School, a private Catholic school in Santa Ana, is handing out Wi-Fi-enabled Apple iPads to all students and teachers for the first time this fall. Eastside Christian School in Fullerton this year plans to issue a new iPad 2 to all teachers and students in grades seven through 12. And Linfield Christian School in Temecula has used donations from parents to buy 25 iPads for fifth-graders to use in class. Schools aren’t the only places for new reading technology. Irvine resident Alison Sansone launched Be There Bedtime Stories (betherebedtimestories.com) last October to encourage storytelling among family members living miles apart. Children or adult readers choose an e-book from the company’s online bookstore of more than 250 licensed titles appropriate for kids 2 to 8. The person reads a story in front of a webcam, and the video is then embedded onto each page of the e-book. The Webtime Stories are accessible any time in a virtual bedroom on the company website. |
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