Dear Mr. Morton,
I want to enrich my home to develop pre-reading skills in my 2-year-old daughter. I’ll be honest; I want her to become a professional person. Any tips?
It’s so important to spend time creating a productive learning environment in the home. At a time when America’s math and science test scores have fallen below those of students in other countries, many are wondering how they can encourage their children, and themselves, to become fluent readers.
Fluent reading is the gateway to success in all other academic endeavors, not only in math and science, but in social studies, history, and government, and language arts as well. Try not to “jump start” your daughter into reading quickly, for the process began at birth and will continue throughout her life, including throughout her professional career. Learning to read is a natural process and the road to reading mastery cannot be sidetracked.
Reading is “talk written down,” so she won’t read well unless she can speak adequately enough to make others understand what she says. And, your daughter won’t speak adequately until she learns to comprehend what she hears — that the words uttered from people’s mouths have meaning and represent certain things.
Even before your 2 year old could comprehend the meaning of spoken words, she had to have a wealth of personal experiences, so the words had tangible associations with persons, objects, and events in her life. It is an orderly, sequential, and predictable four-step process — as natural as flowers blooming in springtime — a wealth of experiences leads into hearing comprehension, which is the forerunner to speech production, which in turn, is the trailblazer to formal reading.
Learning to read well in school parallels language development, most of which occurs before a child enters the school house door. So, in a fun manner, focus on your daughter’s experiences, hearing comprehension, and speech production. Broaden her experiences and talk about them — family picnics, fishing expeditions, and excursions to the airport, beach, library, zoo, and museum will build upon her knowledge of words and enable her to naturally become a fluent reader.
And, read to her often. A recent study showed good readers in school from varied backgrounds had something in common — all had been read to regularly from early childhood on. I’ve always stressed two at-home ideas on how to turn children on to reading:
First, children learn by imitation, so purposefully read in front of your children. When my daughter was in elementary school, I enjoyed grabbing a book or the newspaper, whenever she began her homework, and casually (so she wouldn’t think it was planned!) began reading nearby, in plain view. It was as if I was doing my homework, too.
Second, use your imagination and create fun games from children’s books your kids love. When my daughter was age 3, I made a game from her favorite book, “Green Eggs and Ham.” I constructed large bingo cards and wrote with black magic marker 12 short phrases (“in a box,” “in the dark,” “with a mouse,” etc.) on each card, taken from the book. Duplicate phrases were written on separate tags, drawn from a paper bag. She quickly recognized the words from the book, as I called out each one.
Eventually, she read “Green Eggs and Ham” to me. Other reading games you can creatively make at home are bingo with rhyming words, Old Maid with matching words and pictures, domino games where synonyms are matched, and matching games where words and pictures are matched.
Just remember to keep it fun!
Robert Morton is a retired school psychologist and adjunct professor in the School of Leadership and Policy Studies at Bowling Green State University. Contact him at the Family Journal: www.familyjournal1.blogspot.com.
