Reading Unwound

As you may or may not know the state of Arkansas, where I live and teach, has had a major reading initiative for the last 3 years or so. The idea of this initiative is to make sure ALL teachers know about the “Science of Reading” and use it to correctly and systematically to teach ALL children to read. There has been this back and forth pendulum (like there so often is in education) between Whole Language ideas and Phonics based ideas in teaching reading. That’s okay for the 20-40% of students who will learn to read no matter what. But, for the rest of the kids this tug-of-war is debilitating!

Because of this initiative I have been listening to a lot of webinars, reading books and going to a lot of trainings. With all of this information, I get overwhelmed sometimes and have been trying to figure out a straight forward way to understand how to teach children to read based on how their brains learn to read. It seems to have magically distilled down to a process for me today. Learning to read is not a natural activity for our brains. Our brains have to rework/rewire different language portions of the brain to use them for reading.

The short list of the process in my understanding is this:

Children learn to manipulate the sounds in words (by rhyming games, nursery rhymes and explicit instruction)
Children learn the letter names and sounds (by sight through hundreds to thousands of repetitions)
Children learn to put those sounds together to form words (decodable text)
Children gain a broader spoken word vocabulary that they can use to attach meaning to the words they decode.
Children develop an extensive Sight Word (instantly recognized) vocabulary as they map words to their long term memory (based on meaning) using Orthographic Mapping (strong readers do this with 3-4 exposures to a word, struggling readers may need more than 20)

Number 1 is often happening in the background about the same time as children are learning their letter names and sounds. Similarly, number 4 is actually happening from the time the child is born and begins listening to the language around them. However, you have to again recognize that there are children that will learn to read no matter what as long as they receive some kind of exposure and instruction. Others will require systematic and explicit teaching of each skill. Those that require that explicit instruction will not likely or naturally develop these “background” skills without that explicit instruction. I plan to write another post about each of these steps and more of the nuances that I see in each one.

Update: I have finished the posts about the different pillars and some of the components of specific pillars. If those are helpful to you check them out here: