Pelletier – learning to read games

It’s true that virtually all children learn to speak without being explicitly taught. how to speak. But most children do not learn how to read without some form of instruction in how to read. And that’s because the written language doesn’t map perfectly onto the spoken language. And thus children, many children, most children, need help in learning just how do you map written language onto oral language, or oral onto written language. So this tends to involve at least some type of experience in phonological training.  

 And it doesn’t mean that you have to sit with children with work sheets and have them trace letters and use flashcards. It means that children should learn through very natural ways how to parse words. For instance, can they hear the sounds within a word. So can they say “baseball” without the word “ball”, without the sound “ball”? So that’s how you begin these kinds of games. Just fun things like that. And eventually you can start moving down to the level of the letter itself. So, “say a word without a particular sound on the end”. So, or changing the first or last letter of a word. So, “say ‘rat’ but say it with the /b/at the beginning”. (I didn’t say that correctly but…)  Or “can you say ‘bat ‘ without the /b/ sound?”  

So learning to segment words, and learning to segment sounds within words, that is just strict oral phonological training, and that’s very important. It’s the first piece. It just happens in talk, it happens in games, it happens through rhyming. You can play clapping games with children too so that, you know they can hear the number of sounds in a word. So many people would say that there is only one sound in the word “cat”. But no there are actually three sounds in the word “cat”: /k/ /a/ /t/. And so this is the kind of fun training that we can do with children to help them pay attention to sounds in words. 

So that’s one piece that they need to have. And another piece, at least in alphabetic cultures is to know the names of the alphabet. So they need to know the letter names and they need to know the sounds that those letters make. And this can all be done in enjoyable activities, in schools, in child care and in homes. Gradually they learn to recognize the letter itself, and in a natural context. So this is where environmental print is so important and parents just pointing out things. The famous golden arches I guess, that’s one example of environmental print. But other things would be just the sounds and words around the house. So put the child’s name on his or her bedroom door. And the child just becomes familiar with print as a symbol of something else.