"Mrs. Chambers’ children just play all day!”
Why is it then that Mrs. Chambers’ children enter Kindergarten already able to read and write? Even more than that, they enter Kindergarten with a love of reading and writing. The answer is that Mrs. Chambers’ children DO play all day! How can that be? This poem by Joan Walsh Anglund (1969) may explain what is going on:
“The work of water is bubbles, Day is the job of the sun,
Green is the business of gardens
And the duty of children is fun!”
Childhood can be a fabulous place. By using the world of the child as our inspiration, we can provide activities that are fun but are also meaningful. We can do that when introducing the world of literacy. We need to provide activities that are relevant to the world of the child. What could be a more developmentally appropriate practice than actually using activities that children would choose to do anyway? Now that the importance of developmentally appropriate practice has been recognized, who wouldn’t want to provide activities that children would choose? If we use activities that children would choose, we are providing relevance and enabling effective comprehension.
Let us think about the "natural" world of the child. It is a very multisensory place. What do children like to do? What do children want to do? What do children choose to do? They enjoy a wide variety of activities. They like to gather, explore, jump about, crawl around, make a noise, and they are very, very nosey!
So I used the world of the child and activities that children choose to do as the basis for introducing the wonderful world of literacy.
The results have been wonderful. Most of my Pre-K children enter Kindergarten already able to read, some of them years ahead of their age range. If they are not developmentally able to read, at the very least, they have a solid comprehension of how sounds work. They have cracked the code. The real beauty is that these children have done nothing different from what all Pre-K children should do. They play and have enjoyed fun, developmentally appropriate activities prepared by their teacher.
Using the multisensory activities children love so much, I have built a “big event” for each sound. Children have very limited experiences and cannot build on what is not there. We need to provide concrete experiences relevant to the world of reading and writing.
As Aristotle said, "What we learn to do, we learn by doing." (Aristotle, 384-322 BC)
So the idea of the "big event" was to introduce sounds and how they work by providing meaningful experiences, making sure that those activities utilize the types of activities that very young children naturally employ to discover and learn.
Think of what we provide to the children and how they respond to it in terms of how we react to vacation photographs. When we look at somebody else’s vacation photographs, and it is somewhere we have not been, we show polite interest, but the abstract photographs mean absolutely nothing to us. If we look at somebody else’s vacation photographs, and it is somewhere we have been, we react with more enthusiasm. We now have a personal reference point. We are looking to see if we can spot our favorite restaurant or a particular landmark from our own experience. When we look at our own vacation photographs, we can draw meaning, making references to a real moment in our lives.
Each "big event" provides a concrete experience that will provide a personal reference point to a particular sound and how it works. Each letter has its own "big event," which children thoroughly enjoy. For "d," the children"d-d-dig for dinosaurs" in a box full of Styrofoam peanuts and dinosaurs. For "o," the children move around the room jumping "on" and "off" round orange circles of paper (the oranges) taped to the floor; an early sort of "musical chairs," but with no winners or losers. For "a," each child chooses a toy "a-a-animal," puts it in the "a-a-ambulance" (a toy wagon with a cardboard picture of an ambulance on the side) while the rest of the class chant "a-a, a-a, a-a," the sound of the ambulance siren.
All these activities are so simple, but so very relevant and meaningful to a two, three, four, or five year old. Each sound is accompanied by a large "feely-phonic" letter (Chambers, 2003) made of different materials. The "c" looks like a "c-c-caterpillar," complete with wiggle eyes. The "g" is "golden and glittery." They are big enough to handle, interesting to touch, bright, and give the child more relevant and appealing references to the sound.
Utilizing the multisensory approach even further, the children trace the shape of the letter in a tray of something that begins with that sound. The gooier the substance, the more fun it is, and the more memorable. When "a" is introduced, we have a tray of apple sauce. Who would forget putting their hands in a tray of baked beans the week when "b" was introduced? One year, when introducing "j," I had my tray of "j-j-Jell-O" prepared. However, we were interrupted by a surprise fire drill, and by the time we came back in, the Jell-O was melting. It was an incredibly slushy mess. The children rocked with laughter as the globby mixture slopped around as each child made the shape of the "j" with their hands, ensuring a big splash on the dot! The children in that class, however, were the world’s experts on the letter "j"!
At this point, I should say that, even though (just like most people) we introduce one sound each week, the sounds are not introduced in alphabetical order. At the beginning of the year, I plan the themes for the year and then match the sounds with the themes. In that way, the sound takes on a useful relevance rather than just a letter in isolation. For instance, during the theme of "nursery rhymes," for "Hickory, Dickory Dock," I would introduce "c" for clock, and probably even have the children make clocks on the craft table.
These "big event" activities work particularly well in our multicultural society. The universal language of play transcends the barriers of language. In our town we have a German car manufacturer, therefore we have many non-English speaking children coming to our school. One such three year old arrived during the week we were introducing "l." For "l-l-l," the children each pull out a length of lace from a pot. We fasten the end of each piece of lace to the floor, making lots of lines of lace. Then the children lay on the lines of lace. That afternoon, the little boy from Germany was tracing his fingers down the verticals on the bricks on the wall saying "l-l-l-l." He later traced his finger down the "l" on his name card making the "l-l-l" sound. Nothing had been explained – the success was all due to the child-friendly experience. He was happily reading by the time he returned to Germany at age five.
Incidentally, at a time where money in education is such a sensitive issue, the good news is that this successful system is virtually free. The materials needed are readily available from your pantry, toy box, classroom, or just around your home! There are no socioeconomic barriers for using these techniques.
These activities, because they are based on activities that children would choose to do, promote a positive emotional connection with sounds and the written word. Stress and fear can directly affect a child’s ability to learn efficiently, preventing children reaching anywhere near their potential. When new information enters the brain, it goes first to the hippocampus, which serves as a holding bay before the information moves on to synaptic consolidation; proper learning. The hippocampus can only hold a limited amount of information at one time. Cortisol is the stress hormone that can kill brain cells, and there are more receptor sites in the hippocampus for cortisol than anywhere else in the brain (Jensen, 2007). So if a child is in a stressful situation, they hardly stand a chance. We want open, happy minds, not barricades of stress. I always refer to my room as a "stress-free environment" -- for the children, anyway!
I had a boy referred to me a couple of years ago who had completed one year of Kindergarten. The activities introducing reading and writing at his school had been too abstract and not relevant to him, and at the tender age of six years old, he simply shut down. When he first came into my room, we walked over to where I kept the reading books. When he saw me reach for a book, he physically flinched; such was his negative emotional connection with the written word. I did not go near the books for the next couple of weeks. We spent the time on the floor with our "big event" activities. By the end of the summer, he was able to go back to school with a new, happy relationship with the written word. The last I heard he was "reading up a storm" and doing extremely well at school. Without that summer, when incidentally we met for one hour twice each week, his academic future would have been very different. His "failure" had been due to stress caused by developmentally inappropriate practice.
To avoid the "shut down" syndrome was the very reason I had designed this multisensory technique in the first place. I used to work with struggling students in an elementary school in England. I aimed to find the source of difficulty for each child. The problem time and time again was that as letters and sounds were being introduced at the age of five or six, the child may only be developmentally functioning at the stage of a three or four year old. Think back to Piaget’s five stages of development (Williams, 1969). If sounds and words were being introduced with activities appropriate for five and six year olds, they would not be relevant to those children functioning at an earlier stage of development. Therefore, they would be meaningless. The children would miss the foundation of the early stages of reading readiness, and everything thereafter was adversely affected. It is like the wise man building his house upon the rocks. If the baseline is full of weaknesses, then the layers of skills put on top afterwards will be of no benefit. In so many cases, failure and irrelevant activities had compounded into a shut down full of resentment.
Imagine the despair of sitting in a classroom unable to read the text book or find the website, sitting in fear that you could be asked to write or read. The whole world of science and history may be denied because all your energies are spent on fear and stress.
I wondered if there was something I could do to open up the technical world of reading and writing at an incredibly basic level that was relevant and meaningful, even to two year olds, and therefore, avoid problems later on. I set about creating activities that would be fun for children aged two and over that would introduce words and sounds in a meaningful way.
So what about the children who are not ready to start working with sounds? There is absolutely no harm whatsoever in these activities. They are fun for all the children anyway. What harm is there in digging for dinosaurs or crawling in a cave? Besides, those very children are probably taking in more than you reckon, and will surprise you later.
These techniques will fit in with any established curriculum. Our own pre-school is NAEYC accredited and it works beautifully with the guidelines. The whole point is that it is based on the world of the child and definitely developmentally appropriate practice.
References
Anglund, Joan Walsh, 1969. Morning Is A Little Child. Collins, St. James Place, London, England.
Aristotle, 384-322 BC. Nicomachean Ethics.
Chambers, Janet, 2003. Ready, Set, Read; Building a Love of Letters and Literacy Through Fun Phonics Activities. Zephyr Press, Chicago.
Jensen, Eric, 1998. Teaching With The Brain In Mind. ASCD, Alexandria, VA.
Jensen, Eric, 2007. The New Teaching With The Brain In Mind. ASCD Annual Conference, Chicago.
Williams, Norman, 1969. Child Development. Heinemann, London, England.