The Bub in the Belly

After Ryan learned the letter names and the letter sounds, he started blending the letter sounds to read simple words. To be honest, we did not expect him to start doing that until he was much older. He really surprised us when he showed us that he could.

Here, I'll share some of the items we have around the house that relate to blending. I would also say that, if your child is not familiar with the letter names and the letter sounds, please don't bother him with blending. He's not going to understand it, he's not going to enjoy it and he's just going to be stressed out and turned off.

I should also say that we don't sit down with Ryan and go through words with him. It happens spontaneously and naturally throughout the day while we are doing other activities. We don't have any structured lessons or anything like that.

Ok, the best thing to do is of course to talk, read and sing to your child as much as possible, to let him familiarise himself with the different sounds in words. I can't emphasise this enough - this is the best thing you can do and the thing that you should do.

Off and on we will sound out a word for him - for example, if we see a dog, we will talk about the dog, what it's doing, what sound it makes, whether it looks like our dog at home, etc. We will sound out the word "DOG" for him - /d/, /o/, /g/ and then we will blend the sounds for him. We do it both orally and also with written words when we see words in the carpark, at the supermarket, on the way to the playground, etc. We seldom do it while reading a story as it can be disruptive.

Sometimes Ryan will say a letter or a letter sound and I will build on that. So if he says "/b/!", I might say, "/b/ for ...?" He might say ball, then I might ask, "Yes, /b/ for ball! Any other /b/ words?" Then we'll go on and on for as long as he's interested.

We have "mobile" letters everywhere - alphabet biscuits, alphabet blocks, alphabet stickers, etc. All can be used to put words together. We also have a set of giant upper and lower case alphabet stamps.

Ryan's nanny is taking a family holiday so I have Ryan all to myself this Thursday and Friday. On Thursday morning, we went to the market for a simple breakfast and spent the rest of the morning at home, playing and reading. And dancing, of course.

While we played, we incorporated some Shichida home practice as well - we pretended to be airplanes for image play; we did some ESP games and some memory games (Ryan aced them all); and we did some dots cards.

I mentioned that Ryan has a new sensei for Shichida class this term, after two years of being with Teacher Nuraini. Last week, after class, Ryan's new sensei heaped praises on Ryan, saying he is such a bright child. She said that Teacher Nuraini had told her that Ryan was a bright child and that she could see it too. It reassured me a lot that Ryan's sensei believes in his abilities. I was also grateful to Teacher Nuraini for looking out for Ryan and passing on a good word.

We played a few games with letters and words today, working with different materials. I mentioned in an earlier post that we use stickers quite a lot when we play, and we did today. I thought I'd share a couple of these games with you.

The first one is very simple. We got stickers of different types of vehicles and we put their names together with stickers. Here's Ryan with bus and car on his hands - these were subsequently transferred onto paper together with the rest of the vehicles. Placing the stickers on himself made it kind of special, I guess. He did a dance while he had them stuck on him!

It was only when Ryan started voicing the letter names that we found out that he knew them. Before that, we never tested him - for example, we never asked him to point to the letter "A" or anything like that. When we knew that he knew the letter names, we then gave him materials to reinforce his letter recognition. I'll share these materials in this post. 

These are the items that we used. I am by no means suggesting that everyone must use these items and I am not suggesting that you should not use other items. Neither am I suggesting that you must do things the way we did. There is no magic formula. How you teach your child and what you use is entirely up to you and your child, your preferences and your circumstances.

Ok, again, I stress that Ryan had already learned all the letter names by this time, ie. we did not use these as our first tools to teach letter names. Having said that, we didn't draw a line between these "stages", we still continued to use the items in yesterday's post and we still have most of them out on the shelves for Ryan to play with even now.

First up, the iPhone app. We only had one app when it came to letter names, which was "Fish School" by Duck Duck Moose. This is a fantastic award-winning app which introduces letters, numbers, colours and shapes. I'm sure most parents on the iPhone will have this. Ryan played the alphabet song over and over and over and over again on this app. We installed it when Ryan was about 16 or 18 months, can't recall exactly. Ryan didn't really get into the app until a few months later actually, because we did not give him much time with the iPhone until he was about two years old.

We don't have any apps on the iPad for letter names (we do have some for letter sounds, but that's for a separate post).

We have many many many alphabet stickers - flat ones, foam ones, puffy ones, glittery ones, even those used for scrapbooking. Ryan uses them freely in his artwork; he will select each one, call its name and place it wherever he chooses. Stickers can seem a little wasteful so I always try to stock up when I come across very cheap stickers.

As I mentioned in my last post, Ryan has started to read.

This happened despite our non-efforts to teach Ryan to read. We put in a lot of effort to promote early literacy and language skills, but we did not teach reading and it was not our intention to teach reading before he turned 4 years old. I am writing this post to explain why and to document our journey.

When Ryan was an infant, Richard and I were caught up in the frenzy of new parenthood, and we wanted to do everything, buy everything, try everything, that was on the market. We were seduced by the marketing material which showed babies and very young children reading. How amazing to see an infant being able to point to his nose when he sees the word "nose"!

We bought a sight-word programme called "Your Baby Can Read" (YBCR) (a set of 5 DVDs and books) which promised us that, if we drilled the content into our son, he would learn the words and figure out the phonics rules on his own. There is nothing revolutionary about it - the principle is that if you repeat something often enough, it will stick, which is generally true for anything - but the good thing was that it had been conveniently put together in a package. We watched all the DVDs with Ryan (although we did not adhere to the recommended frequency) and we read all the books with him.

At the same time, Richard and I were slowly calming down and finding our feet. When the novelty of being parents had finally worn off, we stepped back and started giving a lot more critical thought to our parenting choices. We realised that we were doing some things just because others were doing it, assuming that it was the right thing for us. But some things didn't actually feel right to us. And this early reading programme certainly did not feel right.

Firstly, I felt as if I was not respecting Ryan's needs by forcing him to learn something which he did not need to know at his age. After all, what did I expect him do with that ability - read the newspaper and discuss politics with us? He had no conceptual understanding of what he was looking at - he could see the word "elephant" and the image of an elephant, he understood that "elephant" was related to the image, but did he really understand what an elephant was? The only point seemed to be as a party trick - "Look my 10-month old can read the word "HEAD" because he put his hand on his head!" and I certainly had no desire for that. I felt that we should be doing things that were appropriate for his age and that we were depriving him of those precious and valuable experiences. Forcing him to sit there so all those words could be tattooed into his brain gave me the feeling that I was numbing him, shutting down his senses. The expression "drill and kill" came to mind. Look at the photo in this post when Ryan was 6 months old! At the time I thought it was cute, now I realise it's not funny at all - he was bored and numb.

Secondly, I felt that we were putting the cart before the horse. Ryan wasn't talking yet. He didn't know the alphabet or letter sounds yet. Reading was supposed to be the end point of a journey - certain fundamentals have to be put in place before actual reading is taught, and it takes years to do that.

Thirdly, I was not convinced that sight words were the right way to start learning to read. A sight reader is not taught to decode a word. Instead, he is taught to recognise a word. If he has not seen the word before or anything similar, he will not be able to read it. For example, try reading this word: sgiomlaireached. Could you read it by sight? Decoding it, did you suddenly sound like a struggling reader? How sure are you that you decoded the word correctly? (and yes, it is a real word - it means "the habit of dropping in at mealtimes").

I did a lot of reading and research on early literacy. A LOT! The more I read, the more fascinating I found it and the more strongly I felt that we were going down the wrong path.

I learned what early literacy was and what the differences between early literacy and actual reading are. I researched into ways to promote early literacy - all of which do not involve teaching reading.

I looked at several pedagogies. While they all encourage early literacy, none of them encourage teaching reading before 4 years old. It is important to instill language skills before the age of four, but not reading, the two are not the same. In the Montessori method, children are taught to write before they are taught to read. They start by learning the letter sounds and they learn to isolate those letter sounds in words that they hear. Then in Shichida, for the children under 2, we introduce the alphabet and letter sounds but we do not teach reading and we do not teach sight words. I looked at developmentally appropriate practices - they all say that teaching infants to read was a big no-no.

I read about the sight-word approach, the phonics approach, their history and how to teach both. I also looked at the long-term benefits for the child. Children taught with the sight-word method have higher reading levels than children learning phonics at the preliminary stage, because they learn to automatically recognise a small selection of words. However later tests demonstrate that literacy development becomes stunted when hit with longer and more complex words later. You need 20,000 words to be considered a fluent reader. Studies show that, if these students do not learn phonics in addition to their sight word training, they cannot learn more than about 2,000 words by sight alone because that is the average limit of human memory (they can perhaps learn up to 5,000 if they have a superb memory). Even if they learn 3,000 to 5,000 common words, they still read so poorly that they do not like to read.

I looked into the question of whether there was actually any real advantage or benefit to pushing your child to read early, whichever method is used. I found the converse - there was plenty of research telling me that it was not good (especially if not done properly). Richard was of the same view. He couldn't see any advantage to our child being able to read at 12 or 18 months. He said it's not as if Ryan gets a headstart in a race to read all the books in the world. A smart child will read early but reading early will not make a child smarter (ie. not all children who read early are smart).

We came to the conclusion that learning to read could wait. We would build a solid, strong foundation for literacy first and when we were ready to learn to read, we would use a blended but predominantly phonics-based approach (the phonics approach does include teaching sight words which are unphonemic).

So we stopped watching the YBCR videos (with a sense of great relief) and I made no attempt to teach Ryan reading. We continued reading lots and lots of books together and playing with books (including letting Ryan chew on the books and turn the pages). When we read books, we never forced Ryan to look at the words or even look at the page - we just read the book aloud and enjoyed the story, the words, the rhythm and the emotion. If he wasn't interested, we'd drop it and move on. When Ryan got a little older, we taught him the alphabet and the letter sounds, we did pretend play, had conversations, sang songs, recited rhymes and told stories. We also played lots of games with words and letters. I should add that we have never flashed cards to drill sight words into his brain.

The YBCR videos and books were put away, mostly forgotten and ignored. Once in a (long) while, we would pull one of the videos out but when we watched the introduction showing the little baby touching her toes when shown the word "toes", we no longer felt that we needed to teach Ryan to do the same thing. We accepted that sight word readers would read before phonics readers and we stuck to our chosen methodology - building early literacy first and teaching basic phonics. Ryan did pick up some sight words as we went along, like ZOO, LOVE, etc., even RYAN, but we knew he couldn't read yet and it was all right. We never pressured ourselves or Ryan to hurry up.

And yes, it all paid off. Ryan is starting to read now, way sooner than we had expected or planned. He does it by decoding the word according to its letter sounds and blending them together. There are a lot more phonics principles and rules to learn, plus some sight words as well, but this ability to identify the letter sounds and blend them together is the basic starting point. We are on our way!

Now I don't mean to criticise those who have done things differently from us. A few of Ryan's peers who started with the sight word method when they were infants are able to read already and it's fantastic to see them do so. Some of these little readers are adding phonics to their reading skills now (and if not, they eventually will when they get to school, as Singapore schools do teach phonics). It is so amazing to witness a infant/toddler making sense of the printed word, however he acquired that skill, and it must have been such a wonderful effort on the part of the parents so, well done all round!

If you are interested in reading up more on early literacy and developmentally appropriate practices for children of Ryan's age as well as sight words/phonics, you can start with these resources:

Early Literacy at zerotothree.org
Why Don't You Teach Reading? A Look at Emergent Literacy at notjustcute.com
Finding the Sweet Spot for Early Literacy at notjustcute.com
Whatever Happened to Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Literacy? by Susan B. Neuman and Kathleen Roskos
"Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It" (a book by Rudolf Flesch)
Hey, It's Not a Race at teachertomsblog.blogspot.com

Ryan has started to read.

Given a word, he first sounds out the letter sounds and then blends the sounds to form the word. So for example, when he sees the word CAT, he will say "/k/, /æ/, /t/ ... CAT!"

It was such an amazing and thrilling feeling for Richard and me when we first saw him decoding words. Just like when he took his first steps, it was a hugely significant moment. Our son had become, irrevocably, a reader! We were so very happy for him!

Richard and I also felt a huge sense of accomplishment. Unlike learning to walk, which required very little from us, Richard and I have been very involved in Ryan's early literacy journey, from the day he was born. We have been reading lots and lots of books together, doing pretend play, learning the alphabet, learning the letter sounds, having conversations, singing songs, re-telling stories, learning how a book works (including letting Ryan chew on it and turn the pages). We also play a lot of games with words and letters - remember this post? And yes, we did use some iPhone and iPad apps and some DVDs and, I hate to say it, these gave Ryan an extra boost.

As a result, Ryan knows his alphabet, both upper and lower case and he knows the regular letter sounds for each letter. He knows how to isolate the letter sounds to identify the first letter of a word - for instance he knows BOY starts with B, because he can isolate the /b/ sound at the beginning. He knows how to spell the words: LOVE, FOX, BOX, RYAN, ELMO, NODDY, ZOO, MOON, CAT, DUCK and a few more, which showed that he appreciated that a group of letters formed a word (to me, that did not mean that he could read, only that he could recite the letters in the correct order - yes, I'm hard to please). He also knows how to form letters using things like sticks, straws, coins and by manipulating his fingers and arms.

For the past few months, Ryan has been OBSESSED with letters and numbers. Out of the blue, he will yell out some letters and numbers, or letter sounds and words, because he just likes hearing them. Two nights ago, he was saying letter sounds - IN HIS SLEEP. I heard him say "/k/, /æ/, /t/"! Hahaha!

I know he was saying letter sounds because, earlier that same evening (Tuesday evening), I wrote the word "cat" on our little chalk board and he said, "/k/, /æ/, /t/ ... CAT!" I didn't think that was unusual, because he knows the word "cat" and he knows all the letter sounds in the word. So I wrote another word using the same word family ("hat"), and he did the same thing, breaking up the sounds and reading the word correctly. I wrote another word and another and another and he decoded them all without any difficulty - cat, mat, sat, fat, rat, pat, hat, bat. I wrote out words made with other word families - fun, sun, gun; big, pig, fig; and he sounded all of them out confidently! I was so excited - I told Ryan that we had to fetch daddy and show him! When Richard came, Richard wrote the words and Ryan read them all out again! We were all so excited!

The next day (yesterday), I spoke to Ryan's nanny and I told her that he was saying letter sounds in his sleep. She chuckled and told me that he loves to say letter sounds all day. I mentioned that he could read a few words and you know what she said? She said, "Of course! He can read many words!" I was flabbergasted! She also said that she had taught him the days of the week and the months of the year and he could read all of them! Oh my! She was so proud of him - she said that she only needed to show him anything once, and he would remember it. Gosh.

Anyway, when we got home, we went through some words again. Here's a Youtube video of it (about 3.3 minutes long). You can hear Ryan sounding out each letter sound before he puts them together and declares what the word is. I love it when he says "What's next?" at 1:28 of the video!



This post also appears in our Learning at Home section. In other news, my post on the book "How to Build an A" by Sara Midda is also up at our Learning at Home section!

Ryan hardly watches television, simply because Richard and I don't watch much television, and even when the television set is on, Ryan doesn't pay much attention to it. We do, however, have one set of DVDs for Ryan to watch. It is a programme to teach babies to read and it's called, what else, "Your Baby Can Read". The parent is supposed to watch the DVD together with the baby and read the words out aloud and do the accompanying actions. We started Ryan on this programme when he was about a month old and, at first, he didn't want to sit through the entire show. Gradually, he started paying more and more attention and lately, he's even been smiling and grinning at certain parts.

Generally however, I think that he's getting bored of it. Here he is watching the programme, looking very much like he would rather be doing something else.




[Update: We stopped using this programme after a few months because, for various reasons, we did not feel that this approach was right. It was actually this moment in this photo which convinced me that we should stop. Please read this post for our reasons.]