Raising Kids Who Read

by Daniel T Willingham

  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Have Fun, Start Now

  Chapter 1: The Science of Reading The Role of Sound in Reading

  The Role of Knowledge in Comprehension

  Motivation

  Notes

  Part I: Birth Through Preschool Chapter 2: Preparing Your Child to Learn to Decode Helping Your Child Hear Speech Sounds

  Learning Letters

  When Should Reading Instruction Start?

  Notes

  Chapter 3: Creating a Thirst for Knowledge Building Vocabulary

  Building Knowledge

  Reading Aloud

  Notes

  Chapter 4: Seeing Themselves as Readers before They Can Read Indirect Influences

  Getting Young Children to Read

  Notes

  Part II: Kindergarten Through Second Grade Chapter 5: Learning to Decode What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Chapter 6: Banking Knowledge for the Future Understanding Longer Texts

  What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Chapter 7: Preventing a Motivation Backslide What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Part III: Third Grade and Beyond Chapter 8: Reading with Fluency The Second Type of Decoding: Reading via Spelling

  What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Chapter 9: Working with More Complex Texts What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Chapter 10: The Reluctant Older Reader What’s Happening at School

  What to Do at Home

  Notes

  Conclusion

  Appendix: Accessing the Bonus Web Content

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Works Cited

  Index

  End User License Agreement

  List of Illustrations

  Figure I.1. Wishes versus reality in teenagers’ leisure time. Darker bars show how our survey respondents hoped teenagers would spend their leisure time. Lighter bars show actual leisure time spent, according to the American Time Use Survey.

  Figure 1.1. Confusable letters. Even experienced readers occasionally mistake one letter for another, a problem that can be made more likely by unusual fonts. Overall, however, distinguishing one letter from another is not the most common obstacle to learning to decode.

  Figure 1.2. Visual representation of a sentence. The author is saying, “We’re having bacon for breakfast.” Time moves left to right, and the vertical axis shows sound intensity. When people speak, there are not clean breaks between each word, which is probably why children have trouble knowing where words begin and end.

  Figure 1.3. How sentences are connected. At left is a cartoon version of the formal way that a psychologist would diagram your understanding of the two sentences in the text. When you read “the beer is warm,” you look for some overlap between this sentence and the ideas in the one you had already read. When you find the overlap (the reference to “beer”), that tells you it’s a way to connect the two sentences. The connection is shown at right.

  Figure 1.4. Context resolves ambiguity. This sign assumes a certain amount of background knowledge that is left unstated. For what are you to check your zipper? Should I check all zippers on my person, even the zipper on my briefcase? The ambiguity is resolved by the context: this sign appeared on the exit door of a men’s bathroom.

  Figure 1.5. Twentieth-century writer Richard Wright. In his autobiography, Wright describes his first encounter with a fictional story. A young woman—a teacher who boarded at Wright’s grandmother’s house—learned that he was unfamiliar with children’s stories and so told him a pirate’s tale. He was bewitched: “My sense of life deepened, and the feel of things was different, somehow. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”

  Figure 1.6. Reading virtuous cycle.

  Figure 1.7. Twitter bios as statements of self-concept. When we’re forced to be concise, our self-descriptions often refer to roles we play and personality descriptions. See if you can match the Twitter biography (left) with the writer (right).

  Figure 1.8. Reading virtuous cycle with self-concept added. Reading self-concept is both built by and a contributor to positive reading attitudes and the act of reading.

  Figure 2.1. Motherese. Speaking to children in motherese helps children learn to speak and is not talking down to children. But there does come a time that the child is ready for adult speech.

  Figure 2.2. Distinctive letters. Letters could be closed figures made of straight line segments (like the two at the left) or they could include line segments that do not touch (like the two at the right). Our Roman alphabet includes neither sort.

  Figure 2.3. Letters and logos. Telling your child about the letters in logos like the “M” in McDonald’s is an easy way to make her aware that she’s surrounded by print.

  Figure 2.4. Reading proficiency in European countries. The numbers are the average percentages of one-syllable words that children can read correctly at the end of first grade. Portuguese, French, and Danish, like English, have less consistent mappings between sounds and letters than other languages do.

  Figure 3.1. Baby ready to participate in a study that will measure brain activity.

  Figure 3.2. Eleanor Roosevelt on curiosity. “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” In fact every child does have that gift, but it starts to wither in most around age seven. The question for parents is how to ensure a sturdy curiosity throughout childhood. The answer is showing that you value curiosity yourself by honoring it in your child and modeling it in your daily life.

  Figure 3.3. Discomfiting questions. When a two-year-old asks, “Where do babies come from?” we hear a question about the sex act, but that’s not what he’s asking. An answer like, “They grow inside a mommy’s body, near where food is in her tummy,” is probably all he’s looking for at that moment.

  Figure 3.4. Reading aloud. When the National Academy of Education commissioned a report on reading in 1985 written by ten prominent reading researchers, they named reading aloud as the most important activity to get more kids reading.

  Figure 3.5. Learning vocabulary from picture books. If you want your very young child to learn vocabulary from read-alouds (which was never one of my goals), your best bet is a book with one object per page. Read the label while pointing to the object. Just say “cat.” Not, “Look, there’s a cat. You have a cat too, don’t you? Look this one is gray but yours is brown, isn’t it?” If you’re interested in your child learning something, make plain what is to be learned.

  Figure 3.6. Ham it up. If you don’t seem enthusiastic about and interested in the story, why should your child be?

  Figure 4.1. Reading corners. My youngest daughter has a dormer in her room, which makes for an ideal reading spot. Her older sister lacks a dormer but makes up for it with the child-sized armchair.

  Figure 4.2. Be a model. In one of Aesop’s fables, a mother crab chides her child to walk forward instead of sideways. The child responds, “Please show me how, and I will follow.” The thought is still relevant more than twenty-five hundred years later. You can’t tell your child “go read” while you are watching television or checking Instagram.

  Figure 4.3. We’re lazier than we think. You may know that manufacturers pay grocery stores to put their products on more desirable shelves, and no shelf is more desirable than the one at eye level
. This is an example of accessibility affecting choice. It’s hard to believe, but simply having to move our eyes up or down constitutes a cost to finding products. To maximize the chances your child will read, you want to have books so easy to access he will almost stumble over them.

  Figure 4.4. Display bookcases. These bookcases allow kids to easily see what’s available. The design on the left is wall mounted and takes up little room, so it’s a good choice for kitchens or bathrooms.

  Figure 4.5. Independence. Sometimes it’s impossible for your child to help you in what you’re doing, for example, when you’re writing or using a mattock in your garden. In that case, suggest that he do something similar. If you’re writing, he’s coloring. If you’re gardening, he’s watering plants.

  Figure 5.1. Intimidating script. Mann’s description of letters as skeleton-shaped may seem a bit over the top, but when we examine a script that is alien to us—for most English speakers, muhaqqaq, a form of calligraphic Arabic, is an example—the script looks, if not macabre, at least intimidating.

  Figure 5.2. Meaning cues and reading. Suppose a child doesn’t recognize the word “milk.” A whole-word advocate would say that he could figure it out from the other words in the sentence and from the picture. A phonics advocate might reply that the word might just as easily be “cream.” The only way to be sure is by decoding the word.

  Figure 5.3. The phonics advantage. The solid line shows a typical bell curve of student reading proficiency—a few really struggle, a few read very well, and most are in the middle. The solid line shows reading proficiency when systematic phonics instruction is not part of the reading program. The dotted line shows reading proficiency when it is. You can see that phonics instruction helps, but the curves overlap quite a bit.

  Figure 5.4. A feature-rich but confusing remote. This remote has too many buttons, and they are poorly labeled.

  Figure 5.5. Reading practice is taxing. To maximize the chances that your child’s attitude stays upbeat, try to pick a time for reading practice when he’s least likely to be tired or hungry.

  Figure 5.6. Don’t be an auto-correct. Which way are you more likely to learn the correct spelling of “egregious”: You notice that auto-correct fixes it for you, or you’re told that the spelling is wrong and you try again to spell it correctly? When your child reads a word incorrectly, don’t just say the word: let him take another try.

  Figure 6.1. Nonverbal situation model. Visual mental images are a way to represent complex relationships without being tied to one description. You could consult this mental image and just as easily verify “birdcage is under branch” or “branch is over birdcage” however their positions were described in what you read.

  Figure 6.2. Learning new genres. “Literacy” means stories until the early elementary years. At that point children start to encounter new genres. Teachers might have kids publish their own newspaper as a writing project, or they may encourage children to read age-appropriate news stories on one of the many websites designed for kids. “Here, There, Everywhere” was created by a former Today Show producer who wanted to bring the news to young children.

  Figure 6.3. Knowledge and verbal skill. The graph shows how much readers remembered of a text about soccer. Kids identified as having “high verbal skills” remembered a bit more than kids with “low verbal skills” (compare the dark and light bars). But that effect is tiny compared to the effect of knowledge of soccer.

  Figure 6.4. First European colonists. Typically children learn about the arrival of the first European colonists (here depicted on a panel from the US Capitol Rotunda) in their early elementary years But wouldn’t it be easier to appreciate the arrival of the colonists if you first studied the Native Americans who were already here? And wouldn’t it be easier to understand their lives and culture if you had already had a unit about farming? And wouldn’t it be easier to understand farming if you had first studied plants?

  Figure 6.5. Old, dead subjects. The idea that children will be baffled and bored learning about things that are unfamiliar and cannot be physically encountered seems belied by the fascination many children have for dinosaurs and ancient Egypt.

  Figure 6.6. Time in classrooms. Time spent on different subjects in first grade (darker bars) and third grade (lighter bars). The numbers add to greater than 100 percent because some lessons combined more than one subject.

  Figure 6.7. Buy a globe. Globes seem old-fashioned in the age of the web, and they are not cheap—a decent one will set you back fifty dollars or more. But I think they are a good investment. There is no substitute for a globe to give your child a sense of geographic distance. And your child will make surprising discoveries (the United States isn’t bigger? Lichtenstein is a country?) for years.

  Figure 7.1. My sister’s first-grade artwork. My sister brought home drawings from first grade, and my mother thought she was a prodigy. My sister, comparing her work to her classmates, insisted it was nothing special. My mother thought she was being modest, but after attending back-to-school night (and seeing the drawings that other kids had done), my mother reported to my father, “She was right.”

  Figure 7.2. Whole-word reader. This page is taken from a book meant to be used with whole-word instruction. Even if your intent is that children plunge into exciting stories, they can’t recognize enough words to construct a gripping tale when they are just learning to read.

  Figure 7.3. A “word graveyard.” Each construction paper “tombstone” shows a word that students had decided was too boring to be included in their writing anymore. If they were tempted to use one of these, they had to find a synonym.

  Figure 7.4. Building self-image. If you want to shape your child’s reading self-image, it’s not enough to simply draw conclusions for her and tell her what she’s “really like.” She develops her self-image by interpreting her experiences, so you must do the same.

  Figure 7.5. Utilitarian view of reading. Perhaps the ultimate advocate of the utilitarian view of reading was Scottish philosopher James Mill, who raised his son, John Stuart Mill (shown here), with the specific aim of genius. John learned Greek at age three and Latin at age eight. The efforts were in some ways successful, as John is known as one of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, but he later wrote that the intense study imposed by his father had a terrible effect on his mental health.

  Figure 7.6. The practical value of writing. My daughter, then eight years old, asked me to give a message to her sister’s caregiver, who was to arrive later. I said, “I’m sorry, I think I’ll be too busy. Can you write her a note?” The text reads: Dear Julie, Esprit can have these stuffed animals until we am back. Se you later. Hope you have a great time with them! Love, Sarah and Harper.

  Figure 8.1. Two reading pathways. There are two ways to get from print on the page to meaning in your mind. A complete diagram would include other connections—expecting a particular meaning influences what you hear, for example—but we’ll keep things simple.

  Figure 8.2. Prosody and meaning. This grammar joke has made the rounds on Facebook. In school we learn where to place commas based on grammar, but most of us don’t use them that way when we read. Instead, the comma carries auditory significance. It signals an accent just before the comma and a pause after—hence, LET’S EAT . . . GRANDMA. In the second case we hear LET’S EAT GRANDma.

  Figure 8.3. The silent reader. St. Ambrose, depicted in this statue on the Giureconsulti Palace in Milan, was a fourth-century archbishop of that city. St. Augustine famously noted that Ambrose read silently: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Some scholars have taken this passage as evidence that people at that time typically read aloud. That hypothesis matches the fact that punctuation was then used only sporadically; vocalizing would help the reader hear the prosody.

  Figure 8.4. Spelling matters. Spelling instruction seems to promote fluency, but there are other reasons spelling is important. Fo
r example, tattoo machines don’t come with spell-check.

  Figure 8.5. Charles Dickens reading aloud to his daughters. If you institute family read-alouds, you might want to make things a bit less formal.

  Figure 9.1. Movies require complex inferences. A ten-year-old who can follow a complex movie plot should be able to read a comparably complex text, provided he can decode well.

  Figure 9.2. Do adults use reading strategies? Who sits down at the breakfast table and thinks, “Ah, here’s a headline about Ukraine. Let me activate my background knowledge about Eastern Europe in preparation to read this article”? Of course, it’s possible that I used to use these strategies, but after years of reading, they’ve become automatic and I don’t notice that I use them.

  Figure 9.3. Furniture assembly strategy instructions.

  Figure 9.4. Historic letter. This is the first page of a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt about the possibility of developing atomic bombs. This letter would be read in different ways by a historian, a scientist, and a theologian.

  Figure 9.5. Tree octopus. A screenshot from the website describing the fictitious tree octopus.

  Figure 9.6. Average daily word consumption, by media. Note that the measure is “words,” so they might be spoken, sung, or written.

  Figure 9.7. Marissa Mayer. In 2010 when she was vice president for search products and user experience at Google, Mayer wrote, “The Internet has relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment.”a Mayer is now president and CEO of Yahoo!

  Figure 9.8. Hi-lo books. These books are so named because they contain high-interest content at a low reading level. The two books shown here are written at a third- or fourth-grade reading level but appeal to high schoolers. Note that the covers are meant to look age appropriate.

  Figure 10.1. Book it button. Pizza Hut has conducted its Book It! program since 1984. Each month from October to March, if the child meets a reading target set by the teacher, he gets a certificate for a personal-size pizza. When he cashes in the certificate, the restaurant gives him a sticker to put on his Book It button. There are surprisingly few studies of the long-term impacts of the program on reading attitudes or habits.