The Five Building Blocks of Reading

 

            The biggest, most important studies from all over the world agree: direct, systematic instruction in phonics during the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children to read. Yet very few public schools are doing it right.

 

            You need to learn to read with a phonics program such as Spalding (www.spalding.org) in the early grades. A good phonics program is multisensory. That means it involves more than just the sense of sight, the typical sense we think of when it comes to reading. But the best way to teach reading in the early grades of school is to incorporate seeing as well as hearing and touching, or in this case, the physical sensations and movements of handwriting.

 

            A good reading instructional program involves coordinated, systematic instruction in listening, speaking, writing and reading - in that order. After the children have listened, spoken and written the phonograms - the written symbols for the sounds in our language - then, and only then, should they begin to read them, also known as "decoding."

 

            A good reading program also should have a carefully calculated order for teaching the sound-symbol relationships between letters and the sounds they make. You can't just go off willy-nilly and teach the letters as they occur to you, and not in alphabetical order, either. There are a few different philosophies on this - when to introduce the vowels, whether to start with the most frequently-used letters, and so forth - but the basic principle is the same, that there should be systematic progression of the letters in a solid order.

 

            Last, but certainly not least, the instruction should include proper penmanship techniques and the rules of spelling and grammar. If you don't, you're setting the kids up for dyslexia (reading disability), dysgraphia (writing disability) and all sorts of other problems.

 

            Unfortunately, most public schools use a different philosophy of teaching reading other than the phonics-only system. Then, when reading disabilities occur, which is inevitable, schools turn to expensive approaches such as special education, tutoring, an Individual Education Plan, or medication, rather than doing the right thing first: instilling the cognitive skills into the child that are mandatory for reading.

 

            Here are the five building blocks of reading that children obtain best through a phonics-only introduction to reading:

 

            Phonemic awareness: the cognitive ability to blend, segment, and analyze sounds

 

            Phonics: the sound-symbol connection between the sounds the letters make, and how they look as text

 

            Fluency: how rapidly and expressively a child can read

 

            Vocabulary: knowledge of what words mean

 

            Comprehension: understanding with high accuracy what text means

 

            If your child's kindergarten and first grade teachers don't know about these five building blocks, or don't agree that they're essential, you might consider switching schools. A good foundation for reading is that important!