Learning to read books- 4yo

[LilaGrace]

My DD (who'll be 4 in May) is showing great interest in learning to read. Can anyone recommend a great series of books which have simple words for her to read herself (with my help) along with a story? Ideally ones where the books in the series gradually get harder. I remember the Peter and Jane ladybird books from when I was a child and was hoping for something like those (but more modern!)

If we read through phonetically decoding, even if that only took a fraction of a second, it wouldn't be possible to read the passage fluently. Context is also important, eg an adult reader can predict that university will follow Cambridge - there's so much more to reading than phonics

There have been dozens of experiments and research papers written on this topic, some using very sophisticated experimental designs and eye movement tracking, and it has been definitively proven that extremely rapid and unconscious decoding (as Mrz stated above, at extremely high speed and using parallel processing) must be taking place when skilled readers read, although that is not necessarily the only component involved.

As far as context goes, it's been demonstrated that context can be used to predict only a quite small percentage of normal text - if I recall correctly it's less than 10%, so it's not a big factor.

Whole word readers do exist, since we have after all been using that method of teaching for many years, but if their memories are normal, they will only be able to memorise a small percentage of the tens of thousands of words in English. They also struggle to learn new words they encounter in text (a major way that most of us improve our vocabularies) because they have literally no idea how to pronounce them, and so they have a tendency to skip over words that they don't recognise, with the result that they may be able to get the gist of a text, but miss all the nuances. Fortunately, most children taught via whole word methods actually work out the alphabetic codes to at least some degree for themselves, and so manage to do better than this.

brasseye, I'd say the opposite - the 'Cambridge' text with muddled up letters is an indication FOR decoding and AGAINST whole word recognition. You are able to very quickly understand that e.g. 'hsuoe' is 'house' NOT because of whole word recognition, but because you perceive each individual letter and rapidly put them into the right order, with the first and last letter giving you strong clues. If you only perceived the 'image' of the whole word, it would NOT be recognisable as the same image. Because it isn't! It looks completely different!
If you were to argue that the 'image' is recognisable as the same even if the letters are in a different order, you'd be saying that people who read by whole word recognition are not able to distinguish between two real words that have the same letters, in different order. Or between a correctly spelled word and a typo that involves switching two letters. 'laetr' and 'later' do NOT look the same to you, do they? They are different images. If you were only recognising the image of the whole word you would not be able to determine that 'laetr' must be a typo intended to mean 'later'. It is only by looking at the letters within the 'image' of the whole word that you are able to say that it is the same word but with letters mixed up.

So the 'Cambridge' stuff indicates to me that skilled readers look at all the letters and work out the sounds that they make from their positions in relation to each other. And if the word makes no sense (e.g. because of a typo) they are able to make a very good guess at what it is supposed to mean because our brains unscramble the letters.
Whereas a 'whole word' reader would not be able to grasp a single muddled up word because they present different 'images'.

As a bit of an aside, make sure they see you reading. And enjoying it. Any book that floats your boat.

" I believe that sharing good quality books at that age is key". And no one has denied that sharing good books isn't important for young children it just isn't a good way to teach them to read.

The passage (or variations of) started life as an email circulating on the internet and didn't mention Cambridge University, that was added after the meme appeared in the press) who consulted a researcher about the content.

There was never any research carried out at Cambridge University.

The meme claims that the order of the letters within a word don't matter because we read words as wholesobviously that's untrue or we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between pairs of words like salt and slat or split and split and one permutation can result in many different words, and, while you can take into consideration the sentence's context, one still can't be sure about the author's true intention of word choice.

In the passage almost half (31 out of 69) the words are correctly spelled (all 2 and 3 letter words are unchanged). The words that are unchanged are also often "function words," — the, you, me, but, and — which help keep the grammar of the sentences basically unchanged.
It also transposes adjacent letters, which makes the words easier to read. For example, "thing" is written as "tihng," not "tnihg"; "problem" is written as "porbelm," not "pbleorm."
The sentences are simple and, given the unchanged words, one can deduce their meaning easily.

There is some truth that we can read words with jumbled letters (think anagrams) but there is a cost. Experiments carried out by the University of Durham to investigate the claims found that small changes resulted in a 12% decrease in reading speed and the more words and letters transposed the bigger the loss in speed.

Sharing good books with a preschooler isn't a good way to teach them to read?

No, far better we stick to books that dont contain any vocabulary that exceeds their current phonic ability. Ensure that they have a limited plot and characters as that's bound to foster a love of books. As long as the child can sound them out then that's all that matters.

Your thinking is so rigid.

"No, far better we stick to books that dont contain any vocabulary" you don't learn to read if there's nothing to read

You are deliberately misquoting me

No, far better we stick to books that dont contain any vocabulary that exceeds their current phonic ability

Why would you do that?

brasseye,

i think you are confusing two different things.

Every pre-schooler - ever schoolchild - should be exposed to a huge range of texts - poems read to them, stories shared orally with them, plays to see, bible passages to be acted out in assemblies, stories and songs on the car CD, people reading books in good TV programmes and acting them out in adaptations, and aklso parents and other adults sitting down reading books with them, online texts to find things out about dinosaurs or astronauts or football teams.

That will foster a love of books and stories, make them better WRITERS when the time comes, and fuel the desire to learn to read for themselves - make them see the point of readng.

However, the books on which a child 'learns to read' - ie practises what they have been taught and gets the buzz of success - have a different function, and it is here that carefully-graded phonic readers have their place. they should not be the child's only exposure to stories, but they should be the books that a child uses to practise their new skills - and the better those books are, the quicker and easier will be the path to all the other types of text.

It's like a child learning to do Maths, or Science - the child who wants to grow up to be a nuclear scientist or a mathematician or a doctor needs to have those ambitions fed by lots of interesting and relevant experiences - but it doesn't mean that the best way to teach them is to give them a nuclear reactor, Fermat;s last theorem or a person to operate on!

Mrz Why would I do what?

Cantkeepaway I don't think I'm confusing anything. I think that phonics are great once children are in school and can be taught properly by somebody with the experience and materials. DD took really well to RWI and it's great to see her read words I know she hasn't encountered before using the phonics she's learnt.

But this thread was about a 3yo preschooler and my original point is that I'm not sure they need to be taught phonics at that stage unless the parent knows exactly what they're doing and what scheme the school will be using. I've heard teachers say that it's difficult when children start school pronouncing sounds incorrectly and they have to relearn.

I just think it's ridiculous to suggest, as somebody did up thread, that it could be damaging to just enjoy books with a preschooler and not embark on phonics. No 3yo is going to be put off reading by cuddling up with their parent and a book, but I wonder how many are put off by well meaning parents hot housing them with phonics flash cards or whatever.

Did you forget what you said? ...here's a reminder "No, far better we stick to books that dont contain any vocabulary that exceeds their current phonic ability. Ensure that they have a limited plot and characters as that's bound to foster a love of books. As long as the child can sound them out then that's all that matters. "

Mrz I was being sarcastic. I guess that's a nuance which you won't pick up on if you're busy decoding every word.

Perhaps you should try it as you seem to be missing the point ...guessing does limit comprehension.

"But this thread was about a 3yo preschooler " I'm afraid NOT the OPs child is FOUR and wants to learn to read ...

"No 3yo is going to be put off reading by cuddling up with their parent and a book," again no one said that it would put a FOUR year old off to cuddle up with a parent and a book.

"but I wonder how many are put off by well meaning parents hot housing them with phonics flash cards or whatever." Are you suggesting the OP is hothousing by supporting their child's interest in learning to read?

You can keep shouting FOUR but if you re read the first line of the OP I think you'll learn that the child is indeed 3.

My DD (who'll be 4 in May)

Oh and the people suggesting flash cards are also suggesting teaching whole words NOT Phonics.

I bet you feel pretty silly now given the subject matter of the thread

Brasseye, the thing is, what did you do to encourage your DD's learning through whole word recognition?

Did you ONLY read and share books with her as stories, or did you point out individual words to her to encourage her to recognise them? As you realised that she was recognising some words and encourage her to repeat them back to you when you saw them in texts?

What the experienced reading teachers on here are suggesting is that if a child is desperately interested in learning to read (DS was interested to the point of obsession ... to the extent that by the time I had discovered what phonics scheme his school would use and got materials etc he had taught himself ...) then the most helpful approach would be by pointing out phonic sounds not words, and if the child /parent wants to 'practise that skill', that they might want to find some simple phonic readers rather than picking out individual whole words in a general children's book.

IME the age of the child is less relevant than the extent of their obsession with the need to decode the text around them! DS was obsessed at c. 3.5 - 4. DD was never obsessed, so started school a couple of months before her 5th birthday as a non-reader. Both have remained able readers.

[Sorry, rogue 'and' rather than 'did you']

I didn't do anything in particular other than read to her. Obviously at some point she had begun to follow the text as it became apparent that she knew some words in her environment when she was 2. I never made a point of actively teaching her anything.

I've always been an avid reader so the most important thing for me was just for her to enjoy books in the early days. I maintain that if they have an aptitude for reading when they're 2 or 3 they'll pick it up anyway and phonics can follow at school.

Most certainly I should know better than present research evidence to an expert like you? How many children have you taught to read and where can I find your research?