The BIG Picture - Learn to Read

I bet you know what’s in these pictures. There are some very obvious parts. A long nose, a tiny eye, a huge foot with rounded toenails, a wiry tail, a flapping ear, and a wrinkly patch of skin. It’s an elephant, of course! What if you gave this set of images to your baby? Would they know how to connect this grid of images together to also say it’s an elephant?

We are going to show you how learning to read can be made easy, and how and why the way we traditionally learn to read is a way of the past.

What are the first concepts your baby learns? Think big picture. Who Mommy is. Who Daddy is. What milk is. What are some other ideas that you have? They learn what a spoon is, a blanket, a “lovey”. And we don’t go around explaining every part of these things. We don’t say, “Mommy has blonde, curly hair and green eyes. She has freckles and a nose and a mouth. Remember she has two arms and two legs, too.” That would be ridiculous, right? But that’s what we do with reading. We break reading down from stories to paragraphs to sentences to words to letters to sounds.

Let’s look at this another way. If you have a white, long-haired. 60-pound dog, and your neighbor has a tiny, brown, short-haired terrier with three legs, does your baby still know that they are both dogs? I bet they do, and I bet they’re saying, “Ruff! Ruff"!” when they see either one trot by the window. Babies and toddlers sort what they see into categories. There is literally a rough “outline” of what they see that defines the category. One ball might make noise, another ball could light up, while another ball might make my dog bark, and still another ball bounces distinctly. They’re all quite different. Yet, your baby just sorted these completely different objects into a category called “balls.” This is what we want to aim for with reading; we want to bring all of the smaller pieces of words together and make categories of words.

I think you would agree that it is easier to recognize the word “ball” from “Katmandu” than it is to recognize an “a” from an “e,” right? Your baby thinks so, too! Now, say those words out loud. “Ball.” “Saskatchewan.” They not only look different, they sound completely different. Now say “a” out loud. Now “e.” They’re almost identical. For those of you that feel “a” and “e” are still pretty unique sounds, let’s make it harder.

Say the sound of “a” as in “apple” and the sound “a” as in “avocado.” Now say the sound of “e” as in elephant, and now the sound “e” as in “eel.” Now we have four sounds for two letters. Is this how we are trying to teach our children to read? No wonder they don’t read until they’re older and no wonder it’s easy to have a aversion to reading. There’s too much information and it’s all variable. We need to look at the bigger picture. The BIGGEST picture. Let’s look at words.

Our goal is to teach your child word patterns. There are short words that sound short, and there are long words that sound long. Those are two great categories right there. Short words and long words. Of course, at this point, we are the ones reading the actual words to our children, but they are hearing them and making the connection. Remember, a stegosaurus and a velociraptor are both dinosaurs even though they don’t look identical. All we want to do is set up categories.

Next, we want to set up, support, and reinforce repetition. Why does your child know what a cat is but not a prairie dog? Because you’re always talking about cats and showing them pictures, and maybe your next door neighbor happens to have two amazing kittens that like to hang out on your patio all day, everyday. Meanwhile, you have maybe once shown your child a picture of a prairie dog, and never had reason to come back to it. I digress, but I have read you can have them as a house pet, just like a cat. So perhaps you tried discussing it that one time with your significant other before it was immediately shot down. Now you don’t have a prairie dog, or the real ingrained concept of the animal for your child because it won’t be a part of your repetitive routine.

Now I know what you’re thinking - “this repetition idea makes sense, but my baby sees the word ‘the’ all the time and hears me say ‘the’ constantly, yet doesn’t know what the word ‘the’ is. How does repetition actually work then?” The answer is that words like ‘the’ or ‘an’ are part of sight words, and these words are meaningless - they literally have no other meaning or purpose other than to designate an item or idea. A child’s reading is going to begin with familiarization of words with substantial meaning and representation, so we aren’t going to worry about articles and sight words that are used as connectors and the like. What’s easier to remember, the meaning of the word “the” of the representation of a “tiger”? There’s no argument there, the tiger is going to win hands down, and that creates a connection to the word and concept of a tiger for your child. This will be called step two.

I hope you’re thinking, “Wow! This makes so much sense!” Since we’re on a roll, let’s keep going. When you read an ABC book to your baby, what’s on the page? “Aa” and a picture of an alligator? And when you read this book to your baby, what are you actually saying out loud? “A is for alligator,” is the most popular response. Now, press pause and go inside your baby’s head for a minute. You see an “A”. You also see an “a”. You see a green alligator in the green grass with a yellow bird on its nose and a blue river flowing. You hear mom or dad tell you “A is for alligator”. What did your baby learn about reading? Nothing. Think about it, what part of the information that your child saw is helping them to read or process that “Aa” is a letter in the alphabet? If anything, we could go pretty far to one extreme and say that our children are actually learning that “Aa” means “alligator”, so every time they see the letters “Aa” they’ll say alligator! I know it sounds crazy, but if we all think back in our kids’ lives, we can come up with a few instances of mistakes like this. I remember when I was in elementary school reading a Beverly Cleary book, one of the Ramona the Pest stories, a student in Ramona’s class misspelled the word “relief” on a test. Guess how he spelled it . . . R-O-L-A-I-D-S. Anyone who grew up in the late 80’s and early 90’s knows the commercials by heart - “Rolaids spells relief!” Ramona wondered to herself why she got it wrong because the man on tv said that was how “relief” is spelled. This type of misconception is all around us and especially for our little ones. If you haven’t learned the words yet, there is strong possibility of conditioning an incorrect connection that can take months or years to re-lean for letters and what they symbolize. (Now that it sounds like we’re bashing the ABC’s, it deserves to be said - it’s still good to read to your children, even this ABC book! Just don’t get the wrong idea thinking that reading this book out loud will teach your baby to read in general.)

So, what do we do next? We put it all together. So far, we have discovered that we need two things. 1) We need to have long words and short words, and 2) we are going to use some of them more often than others so we remember them better. And there you have it. I promise, this is it. This short blog will be the backbone of our reading program.