The Bub in the Belly

We started a new term at Shichida last Sunday. Sunday classes started one week earlier than the rest this term because there are three public holidays this term which fall on Sunday, so this was sort of a make-up class that the centre was kind enough to arrange for us.

I walked into the class to find that we had a new sensei - I actually thought I was in the wrong class! I was not aware of the change because it was announced last week, at the last class of the previous term, which we skipped (we were in Malaysia).

Hmm.

I have always said that the success of the Shichida Method does not lie with the sensei. It lies with the parent. The method focuses on the bond between parent and child, believing that it is the love of the parent which enables the child to flourish. So, how do I feel about this change in sensei?

Ryan has been with his (now previous) sensei for 2 years, ever since his very first Shichida class. There were two occasions when she was switched to a different class and both times, we switched classes to keep Ryan with her. Both times, we switched together with one of Ryan's classmates, ZR. ZR was also her student from the beginning and she has told us that the two boys are the best two students she has. Whether or not that is true is irrelevant, what I treasured was her absolute belief in Ryan's abilities. I also felt that she genuinely loved him. So there is a sense of loss, at least on my part.

I was not overly concerned about whether she was a good sensei, I just did not want to disrupt the bond that had been formed between her and my son. She understood him and his character/personality and he understood her instructions. One time, I mentioned that I didn't think Ryan understood a certain activity during home practice. She leapt to his defence and said that he understood it when they did it in class and he understood what she wanted him to do (meaning that he definitely understood the activity).

I was also a little disappointed that I had not been around last week to discuss the change with ZR's parents. Out of the six students in the original class, we were the only two that remained together. The rest either dropped out or transferred along the way, I don't know. New students joined the class to take their places. We were the two familiar faces. When Ryan's sensei switched classes the first time, we conspired with each other, against the rest, to get spots in her new class (there were only a few spots so not all the students could transfer, although I think the rest were not bothered). The students in the new class were relatively quiet and it was a pleasant class.

Then Ryan's sensei was transferred again. We and ZR followed her and ended up in a very boisterous class. The parents were very friendly, they would chat to each other throughout the class and even to each other's children. The very first class we were there, two parents distributed biscuits to all the children. Another time, one parent gave out huge balloons (those long ones that you can bend and shape into a sword). ZR's dad was not that thrilled because he felt that it was not very disciplined. He told me that it seemed as if only Ryan and ZR were focused, the other children (and parents) did not seem very serious about the whole thing.

I was not sure what to make of it actually. I didn't really mind the slight indiscipline, as long as Ryan's concentration was not affected. Ryan had experienced the greatest levels of distraction when the class was comprised of babies, fussing and crying in class, and he had trained his focus and concentration from there. This was peanuts to him now, he didn't bat an eyelid. As for me, although I was a little overwhelmed by the friendliness, I did feel quite welcome. Still, I admit that it was a little bit of a culture shock to me and I was glad that ZR and his dad were there, it gave me some comfort. It was like the two of us were sticking together through thick and thin.

Anyway, it looks like Ryan's sensei got transferred again. Since ZR was not in class last Sunday, he must have transferred with her. Escaped to a quieter, calmer class? Most likely.

The issue is, do we want to try to get in the previous sensei's class again?

I discussed this with Richard and after weighing all the factors, we decided to give this new sensei a shot. Ryan was still doing well and we had been warmly accepted by the other parents. There are little differences between the new sensei and the previous sensei but perhaps that is a good thing. At best, we could look at it as a new phase - Ryan is definitely moving into the output stage now - so perhaps a new face would give him the sign that it's a new game with new rules. At worst, it shouldn't make a difference since the sensei is just there to guide the parents (not the children).

A part of me is still sad. I do feel that I've lost someone whom I've grown attached to. We got Ryan's observation book back last Sunday and for last term's report and evaluation, his (now previous) sensei had given him top scores in everything. Her comments were:

"Was able to verbalise words and confident in his activity. Ryan has really grown to a brilliant and intelligent boy. All the way, Ryan :)"

Sigh. It's as if they were parting words. If only I had known.

To Teacher Nuraini Ahmad - thank you so very much for being patient with Ryan, cheering Ryan on, believing in Ryan and loving Ryan for the past two years. I hope that our paths will cross again. Take care.

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!

Top: Tommy Hilfiger (12 months)
Bottom: Fox Kids
Shoes: Polo Ralph Lauren

Reunited... and it feels so good...!

The show started on time, at 7 pm, and lasted till 8.30 pm, with a 15 minute interval. All the familiar characters were there on stage - in this photo you can see (from left to right) Ernie, Big Bird, Telly Monster, Zoe, Rosita, Elmo, Grover, Prairie Dawn, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster, Bert and Honker.


Then there was Oscar the Grouch. Oscar's mom made an appearance too!


Count von Count, with Grover here.


We got seats in the first row which was still a comfortable distance from the stage, so we had a great view. It was song after song after song and Ryan paid full attention throughout. He had a fantastic time!

Here I'll share with you some image play examples that we have done in class. Remember, the class examples are limited because there aren't many props in the small classroom and we need to keep the activity short. Take them as ideas for image play at home which you can improve on and expand at home. Remember also, and as I explained in Part 12, don't just hand your child some toys and ask him to play by himself. Get involved, guide him along and make it a multi-sensory experience.

When Ryan was less than one year old, we did very simple pretend play in class. For example, sensei would show him pictures of a panda and what the panda likes to eat. Then he was given a picture of a panda and told that the panda was hungry. He was then asked to pretend to feed the panda some leaves.

Another example for babies: the sensei showed him a series of pictures and told a story. Then she showed each picture again and Ryan acted out the story (with my help). For example, the sensei showed a picture of a calm sea and she said, "The sea is calm, it's a sunny day, we're sailing out to sea in a steady boat". So the babies pretended they are in a boat on a calm sea. They listened to the seagulls calling, the waves lapping, they smelled the sea, they felt the warm sun. Then another picture was shown - the sky is dark, there is lightning - the sensei said, "A storm is coming, the rain falls down, the boat starts to rock from side to side." The babies rocked from side to side, they hid from the rain, they heard the lightning clap. Then the story went on - the storm subsides, all is well, suddenly a shark appears in the water, everyone is scared, but the shark soons goes away and everyone is relieved" and so on. The little babies followed the story with the appropriate reactions. (Of course, at this stage, the parents play all the roles.)

When Ryan graduated to the class for 1 year old and above, the pretend play was more detailed. As the children are still at an early stage of training so, to help them along, we show them a lot of images and give them some props and materials to play with. Some of the scenarios may be unfamiliar to them - you may want them to pretend to go on a picnic but some of the children have never been on a picnic so they would not know what to visualise in their minds. The images and pictures will help.

When Ryan moved up to the class for 2 year olds, we added on the imaginary story.

[Click here to read the rest of this post and to see examples of scenarios for pretend play and imaginary story for Ryan's current level.]