But a time will come, O Babe of Tegumai, when we shall make letters — all twenty-six of ‘em — and when we shall be able to read as well as to write, and then we shall always say exactly what we mean without any mistakes.
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories for Little Children, 1950.18
Once your child is at school — and, you believe, mostly ready for formal learning — you are then faced with some of the most prolonged and complicated debates in education. What is the best way for a child to learn to read? To spell? To write? To do maths? In the rest of the chapter you will find some answers to these still hotly debated questions, as well as ideas for how to support your child’s learning.
So how should children be taught to read? Should the focus be wholly and solely on phonics, or on ‘look and say’ whole word methods, or a mix of the two? This isn’t just ‘school business’ as parents do a great deal of the teaching in their own homes. I don’t feel brave enough to make a call on this one. Children do need to be able to decode words, and phonics are very useful for that. But children also need to care about what they are reading, and phonics are very dry all by themselves.
The approach I’d recommend for parents is to find a book that your child will just love in addition to the school readers. Book selection is absolutely key here. It says to the child, ‘I know who you are’ and also, ‘I know you are going to get this’. Read him a chapter at a time, and then pick a short passage you both particularly liked, and read it a couple of times to him. Then ask him to read it with you. He can then read it aloud to you or quietly to himself.
Home readers can bring out the sharks
One of the awful things that can happen to a child’s reading is the response of parents to ‘home readers’. Suddenly reading together stops being about having fun and becomes, ‘What will the teacher be thinking of me and my parenting if my child can’t read this tomorrow morning?’
The entry of that imaginary third and potentially critical person upon the scene is very destructive. With them looking intrusively over your shoulder you stop supporting your child’s fledgling attempts to read and begin speaking in a ‘teacher voice’. You stop saying, ‘Oh darling, that was brilliant!’ and, ‘I didn’t think you were going to get that one, but you did!’ and start saying things like, ‘You’ve got to sound it out again because that was wrong’, and, ‘Are you even trying?’
Often there is shark music playing (see Chapter 4). You might need to listen for it attentively in that whole learning to read period. Your anxiety can greatly slow down your child’s reading once it has started, and you will be left with a residue of regret that you let an imaginary negative other person into the arena that once belonged to just you and your child. Ghosts! Shark music! They must be banished over and over.
The school readers are hard to make fun at the best of times. Systematically teach the hard words before even starting the story. Talk about what the book is likely to be about. Remember to giggle over the fact that there are few surprises in school readers. Most importantly, never ever let your child feel he has failed — and, indeed, never let him fail. If teaching a few words doesn’t work, read the whole book to him. Then read it with him a couple of times. Then let him read it with you. Let your child be in charge of how much help you give. One strategy I’ve recently developed is to say ‘I’m going to say the words anyway, if you want to you can beat me to it’. I leave enough time for a child to say the word, but not so much time that the meaning of the sentence will be lost.
Children need to be supported to take risks. When you hear such things as ‘I could have done that Mum, you didn’t need to tell me’ you know that your safety net is a bit too constrictive. When you hear ‘it’s too hard’ then you know that you need to strengthen that safety net more: an easier reader, more teaching time beforehand, more fun, less judgement.
Grow in your mind a picture of a successful reader and let your child catch that picture from you, rather than the picture of your fears that he will never learn.
But perhaps your child is missing a few of the items on that list? Please don’t start to worry that he is falling behind. Remember that language skills and knowledge are also developed by talking and listening. Make this your focus in addition to helping him develop the different qualities and abilities required for reading discussed in the previous chapter. Read aloud and then ask him to tell the story back to you, provide audio books and ask what the story was about, talk to him, listen to him.19 All of this will push along his vocabulary and understanding of how stories work. Remember that Finnish teachers mostly require oral work from their students for many years, yet at fifteen they are outperforming Australian children who have been required to do written work for a great deal longer.
In addition to reading, maths, writing and spelling are also important. If children possess the precursory skills for reading then they are mostly ready for the rest of formal schooling. There are a few caveats to this statement, however, and you will find that information in the rest of this chapter. (If you are looking for more ideas to help a struggling reader, you will find them in Appendix V.)
According to a recent review of the skills required for arithmetic, there is only a little crossover with skills required for reading. The main one is the ability to hear differences in sounds. This allows children to easily recognise number names and begin to learn what ‘ten’ of something looks like compared to ‘twenty’ of something.9
In this same research the finding was that the very biggest contributor to maths skills is something called ‘digit magnitude judgments’. For example, is a three bigger than a seven? Is a four bigger than a three? The suggestion was that children develop an innate understanding of numbers in relation to each other.
The tests used in this study actually used the names of numbers, rather than real world objects. In doing so they explicitly linked language with numbers. But what happens if you take language out of the equation? Can children develop number concepts if they don’t have the words for them? It seems as if they can. According to the authors of a 2008 study, ‘Here, using classical methods of developmental psychology, we show that children who are monolingual speakers of two Australian languages with very restricted number vocabularies possess the same numerical concepts as a comparable group of English-speaking indigenous Australian children’.20
What this means is that children do not learn about numbers just from words. This is actually an important understanding for parents to have. Children learn about numbers by playing with groups of objects. From crawling and picking up pieces of fluff they learn that three pieces of fluff on the floor are more than two or one piece. In fact, when my mother (who at sixty five years old is one of the most experienced Occupational Therapists I know) is asked to help a student with maths difficulties she teaches them to play a game called ‘stones’.
This game does not require numerals at all, just the opportunity to sit on the floor and mess around with a pile of stones. Little bears or counters or blocks could equally be used, but my Mum likes to use stones best of all.
They are rough, so they are satisfying to touch. They are quite heavy, so they engage the proprioceptive (knowing what a body part is doing without needing to watch it) sense. They don’t roll away. They are all slightly different from one another, so they are a bit more visually interesting. And they make a sound as they drop.
What does she do with the stones? She encourages children to play with them. Is eight still eight when they are in a line? What about if they are in a little stack? Is this still eight? Is eight sticks the same as eight stones? Is eight ‘taps on the ground’ the same as eight stones? What happens if you make them into two piles? What happens if you make them into four piles? What happens if you find a matching stone for every stone you already have? If you take two away, how many do you have? And if you put them back together, and take away six, how many do you have? If you add one more, how many are there? If you take one away, how many are there?
In this game, which has surely been played by children for thousands of years, lie all the number concepts needed for the first few years of school. There is constancy — because eight is always eight — and magnitude: nine is always bigger than eight and seven is always smaller. There is ‘reversability’: the way that subtraction and addition match each other (2 + 6 = 8 and 8 – 6 = 2) and the way multiplication and division match each other. It’s all in there. The best way for you to see whether or not your child is ready for the formal requirements of mathematics is to sit down and ‘play stones’.
Reading and spelling have a great deal in common: words, sounds, letters, meanings. But there’s one critical difference. Spelling a word requires you to have more information stored in your memory than reading that word. To read a word your child must ‘pull out’ from her memory the sounds that match the letter shapes and say it. To spell a word your child must hear a number of different sounds within the word and then match them to the correct letters and then write them down.21
The critical precursor skills for spelling are:
the ability to identify syllables in words
being able to hear the different sounds in a syllable
strong memory skills: visual, auditory and proprioceptive
strong proprioceptive skills (knowing what a body part is doing without needing to watch it) so that writing a particular word can become as automatic as writing a letter shape — so it just ‘flows off the pencil’.
Spelling and reading are both language based skills, but use different parts of the skills base. For example, being able to hear and clap out syllables is vital for spelling, although it isn’t important in reading. Once a child is reading they don’t need to worry greatly about hearing the separate sounds in a word — but they do for spelling.
How to teach spelling is an even more vexed topic than how to teach reading. There is the look, say, cover, write, check method, which, if used by itself, seems remarkably like the ‘whole word’ method for teaching reading. It asks children to learn a whole word. This method certainly works well for children with a very good visual memory. Then there are the methods that focus on analysing matching sounds to letters and these definitely work better for children without that extremely good visual memory.
This problem is one that the education researchers are likely to be working on for a long time to come. Different schools use different methods, and parents can spend quite a lot of time comparing and matching the different methods. One research report surprisingly suggests that dyslexic children need to find the method that works best for them for learning difficult words. Perhaps this is wise advice for all children in learning spelling: to simply work from their strengths?22
After reading that report I thought long and hard about my older children’s various strengths and difficulties and instituted a ‘problemsolving’ approach. They are now able to hear all the sounds in a word, and know the different ways a sound could be spelled (and sometimes there are many!) Choosing which spelling to apply was the next step for them. My (and their teacher’s) approach involves pulling their decoding skills and spelling rules together to work out how to approach spelling a particular word. For example, the ‘t’ sound can be ‘ed’ in many words. ‘Equipped’ sounds like ‘equipt’, and that is what the boys wrote. So we are teaching them to always ask themselves, ‘Is there a base word here?’ They are learning not to rely solely on the rules, but on a thoughtful application of those rules.
Writing really comes in two pieces. First of all comes the ability to actually form letters and words. With that in place, writing is then the ability to put our thoughts in written form.
To be able to write, children need to understand the way their culture sees the world. In some Islamic cultures paintings are all abstract. There aren’t paintings of people, horses and dogs. When someone who grows up in that culture is shown a picture, say, of a horse, they may well not recognise those curves and straight lines and filled in forms as representing a horse. When we look at Indigenous art we might see emu tracks but an Indigenous observer might see the emu. Conversely, the same observer might not see an emu in a painting where we would. One example of this is that children learning to draw and paint frequently begin by drawing their people and animals upside down. They haven’t learnt the convention that feet are always pictured as down and heads are up in art.
Australian children need to learn that letters join together to make words, and that they run from left to right across the page. They need to know this before they attempt to write. Books are obviously essential in teaching this but more powerful still is writing at a child’s request.23 Anywhere between two and three years children will begin to have little stories that they would like you to write down. (If you do this you will also have the keepsake of a window into your child’s mind from an earlier age to treasure.)
Pushing children to begin physically writing early is counterproductive. Every parent has noticed that their child’s writing of her name looks far more babyish than her other writing attempts. This happens because our brain is quick to ‘automate’ letter shapes. Children learn to write their name first of all. Once this has become automatic it resists alteration. Children become ‘stuck’ with this immature writing of their name until they become conscious enough of it to deliberately rewrite the program.
It is better to wait until their fine motor skills are precise enough to make learning to write something they do once, rather than many times. There is a huge variation in how fast children obtain both of these skill sets. The children with well-developed proprioceptive skills (who know just where every body part is and what it is doing without looking) will find this easier.
Holding a skinny stick and precisely controlling it to make a set of prescribed forms on a slippery piece of paper requires highly developed fine motor skills. Children need to build up to it. Games such as threading beads, painting, modelling with playdough, cooking, sewing: anything at all where your child is enjoying using her hands is very helpful.
Parents need to be very sensitive in our approach to early attempts at writing. Literacy teacher Judith Duff specialises in preventing ‘reluctant writing’ in classrooms. She says, ‘Too often teachers and parents will rewrite the child’s words underneath the child’s writing: “This is a picture of Mummy and me cooking.” What I ask the teacher to do is write: “Thank you very much for this picture which shows you and Mummy cooking.”’ The same teaching occurs but without the message that the child’s own writing isn’t good enough.24
It is not reasonable to expect children to coordinate writing with creative composition until writing is automatic. And yet this is the approach we take. The risk with doing this is that children will not develop good thinking skills as they get used to writing a ‘stock answer’ neatly. The other risk is that they will hate writing as the gap between what they can write and what they can think leads to harsh self-judgment. It is hard to imagine an equivalent situation for adults, but perhaps being taught how to play chess one year and then being asked to take on the grand master in a well-publicised match the next would come close.
Finding words to suit the writer’s purpose is quite a different skill from the physical production of writing letters on a page. Expect that you may need to scribe for your child even into the teenage years if he is to learn to capture his thoughts upon the page. Let him experience the satisfaction of seeing his ideas plain upon the page occasionally. This makes a big contribution to eventual ‘true’ writing success. Mum scribed for me until I was ten or eleven. Not all the time, but often enough for me to catch the writing bug.
In Appendix VI you will find ideas for helping the child who has difficulty in any of these areas. The learning of academic skills is just one part of attending school, however. The rest of this section of the book is devoted to how to help your child develop the other skills that make a difference at school.