In my first post on this blog, I recounted how I learned to read at a preschool age around 3 to 4 years old. It started with a record player along with a printed guide to match words with what they mean and how they are said.
As my phonetic skills improved, my parents used a combination of reading bedtime stories to asking me to read the books to them and sounding out every word.
This worked wonders as I was able to read out loud and pronounce the words correctly. Along with discussion about the meaning of the story, I learned comprehension. Later, this skill has stayed with me for my adult life allowing me to perform well, even in college.
One limitation occurred in this learning sequence, I found myself sounding out the words when I was doing silent reading in high school. I completely understood what I was reading and tested well on the content, however, I found myself bound to how fast I could read audibly even though I was reading silently. I read silently in my mind as if I was reading aloud.
This gave me a reading speed of around 600 to 700 words per minute in high school. I was awarded for my performance by an invitation to be on the National Honor Society, but it took more time at home to read the material than other kids who became avid readers in elementary school. I recall one of my best friends in grade school, a boy named Bobby, read voraciously all kinds of what I considered big books. I’d go to the library and open the books he’d been reading for fun and I rolled my eyes thinking just how long those books would take me to read. So, the first big book of around 500 pages I read was at age 13. It was a racy novel by Jacqueline Suzanne, named, “Once Is Not Enough”.
I found that the book brought me into an adult world that, as a young teenager, I was hungry to learn about. I was so proud of myself as I held the book up for inspection after I’d conquered it. Wow, I read the whole thing!
No doubt, my childhood friend could have read the book in 4 or 5 hours, while it has taken me two weeks of reading a little every day.
The larger picture I’m suggesting is that the ability to read 1500 wpm or above makes all the difference for you as you become an adult. A wise person once said, you’ll be the same person you are today in 5 years, except for the books you read and the friends you keep. The greatest thoughts in the world have been recorded in the written word, so having the skill to consume them effortlessly is possible one of the greatest skills you can develop in school, K through 12.
Much of what I learned in school, I’ve never used as an adult. Case in point, I took geometry, pre-algebra, algebra 1, 2 & even algebra 3 & trigonometry, but its never made me a dime as an adult. I’m sure it stretched my mind and taught me to be disciplined and focused, but the ability to do abstract math, has served me poorly as an adult.
So, my big question is: how do you go from being able to read words, pronounce them correctly in early childhood to being a fast, voracious reader.
I really don’t know, so I just called my step brother, who though he was a rowdy kid and hung out with the wrong crowd, how he became such a fast reader.
When I was at a university getting my bachelors degree to teach in a public high school, I was doing my internship at a local school and found a 23 page story by science fiction writer named Ray Bradbury that I thought was gripping. It took me about 30 minutes to read and then brought it to the class I was teaching. The students loved it as well because the story held stimulating ideas and was extremely poignant.
I was talking to my step brother, who I thought of as a juvenile delinquent, about how well the class had responded to the story. He said, give me the book, I want to read it. I thought his pride was kicking in and he’d come back to me after a while and feed me a bunch of garbage about how he’d read the story and that he would try to snow me.
I handed him the book and 10 minutes later, he came back and said, yes, its a good story; I can see why the kids like it.
There was no way he could have read that story in 10 minutes and comprehended all the nuances, so I immediately started pelting him with questions, because that story took me 30 minutes to read while I was in college.
He proved me wrong. He loved the story, he understood the plot completely and he actually read it in one third of the time it took me to read it.
This is why I called him this week, some thirty years later, to ask him how he became such a fast reader.
At first, he kinda shrugged it off, but I kept digging because I really wanted to know because he had humbled me.
He started recalling that he spent a lot of time with his deaf grandparents and they encourage him to read. I thought BINGO, that was it! He learned to appreciate words because he had deaf grandparents. That was the secret.
No, he said, that wasn’t it.
Well, what was the secret, I pressed. He said, maybe it was a couple of things. They had a collection of big Disney books in the house and when he watched the Sunday night, “The Wonderful World of Disney,” it sparked his interest, so the rest of the week, he’d dive into the Disney books, until he got to see the show the next week.
He came up with two other reasons that he might have become an exceptional reader. His uncle was often at his house and he was 13 years older and he looked up to him, so he hung on his uncle’s ideas. His uncle was into politics and higher level subjects. To relate to him, he stretched to please him. This experience got him reading some of the news much earlier than most children.
The other thing was that he loved music. He loved how it made him feel and he would spend hours and hours listening to it. He would bang his imaginary drums in the air with his eyes closed envisioning himself on stage before an admiring crowd.
He listened to every word of the lyrics and could spout them off along with the songs for hours. This attracted him to reading everything he could get his hands on to learn about the music, the musicians’ bios and the meaning of their songs. This hunger to learn about music drove him to read and read and read everything he could.
To sum it up, he said his desire to learn about what he was enjoying on the radio is what got him to love reading.
This shatters my paradigm because I was looking for a sequential technique for early childhood reading curriculum that leads to success, but for him, it was his desire to know more.
How do you add that as a skill? Its elusive because who knows what will spark a young mind to want to read everything they can get their hands on about a subject that attracts them?
So, for me, the formula for reading success as a young child is:
- Phonics
- Someone reading you bedtime stories
- Then, getting the child to read the stories out loud so the monitor can guide them
- Getting the child to find a subject that makes them want to learn everything they can about the subject through reading.
Step number 4 could be the most important ingredient in the reading recipe. It seems that children are naturally curious, so one just has to expose them to the world of opportunity until they land on something that inspires them.
What are your thoughts on how to get kids to go from being a competent reader, for testing, to loving to read so much that they can’t put a big fat book down until they’ve read it?
Special Needs Preschool Curriculum 