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| Me, Sarah and Max |
Three year old Sarah brought to me a piece of paper on
which she had written:
X T O
T X O
O T X
“Daddy, Daddy,” she said. “Look what I wrote.”
I looked at it and smiled. “That’s good writing. I’m
proud of you,” I said.
“Would you like me to read it to you?” she asked.
“Sure.”
Sarah pointed to the top line and said, “That says
‘Daddy’.” Then she pointed to the second line and said, “That says ‘Sarah’.”
Pointing to the last line she said, “That says ‘Maxie’.”
“That’s great. Now you’re writing and reading words.”
“Yea, I’m going to read them to Mom.”
I truly was impressed.
Sarah did not know all the letters and knew nothing about spelling, but
at three years old she understood some important aspects of how printed
language works. She knew that -
○ Writing
is a means of communicating. Spoken
words are represented by written symbols.
○ Words
are comprised of letters, not numbers or other symbols.
○ The
same letters can be arranged in different orders to produce different words.
○ Print
is read from the top of a page to the bottom of the page.
Young
children have remarkable abilities to learn language simply by mimicking the
language at home. That natural language ability applies to written language
when there is plenty of written language around home to be mimicked. My children had that opportunity. They were
read to daily from birth. There were
hundreds of children’s books in our home. Scattered around the floors and
furniture, a book was always within reach. By age three, Sarah had heard her
favorite stories read so many times, usually on someone’s lap with a finger
pointing to the words, she could pretend-read them to her younger brother.
Instruments
for writing and drawing were equally pervasive. It began with a fat crayon
tucked in a small fist making circles, loops and line. In a few months abstract
art became recognizable figures. Incomplete figures became more complete.
Scribbles became letters and, by age three, letters were arranged in a
deliberate order that demonstrated some of the proper conventions of writing.
By the
end of kindergarten, Sarah could write and spell a dozen or so words - mostly
proper nouns - the names of family, friends and pets. In 1986, kindergarten
children were not pushed beyond that level of skill. Independent reading and
the writing of sentences were saved for first grade.
First
grade and, to some extent, second grade were not particularly good school years
for Sarah. The content of reading and writing was tedious and boring. The short, simple
stories with limited vocabulary were bland. Near the end of second grade, she
got her hands on a Judy Blume book, It’s Not the End of the World, a
chapter book about divorce for older readers. I’ll never know why she was
attracted to that book, but she read it, perhaps because of something she
feared. Maybe she knew a classmate whose
parents were getting divorced.
My
daughter’s early experience with written language illustrates that a child can
go, within two years, from being a non-reader in kindergarten to an independent
reader who can read a lengthy book with a complicated story. It can happen
quickly, even when school-based instruction is not particularly useful or
interesting.
There are obvious limits to what can be inferred from
this story. Sarah is only one child and does not represent all children. Gender
and genetics could a factor. However, there are well known principles in this
story that everyone should understand:
● Humans
are biologically programmed to learn language early in life. The longer it is
delayed, the harder it gets.
● Home
and family are key factors. In a language-rich home, learning language happens
naturally without formal teaching.
● Compared
to a language-rich home, the language of school can be both technical and
limited. Teachers will likely encourage listening and reading while
discouraging talking and limiting writing.
● Mothers,
fathers, siblings, extended family and neighbors are the first and most
powerful teachers. They provide the language playground young children inhabit.
Generalizing the value of family literacy beyond my
personal experiences is problematic. A fourth of our nation’s children live in
poverty - the highest percentage in any industrialized country. I am an
educated man with the means and desire to raise my children in a literate home.
But poverty does not have to be an obstacle to literacy. It is not costly. Literacy is a cultural tradition, not unlike
the kind of food we eat. Words,
sentences, stories, poems and information are free to anyone who chooses to
avail them. All parents possess life stories. They own points of view, ideas,
songs, rhymes and information to be shared. We have access to libraries with a
deeper and longer view of culture. With
these possessions parents can build a language world that leads children to
literacy.
Read for yourself. Read to our children.
Take dictation from children and let them watch as their words become print.
Let them trace their words. Soon, they
will be reading and writing to us. Soon they will become the newest member of a
literate community.
