Getting Acquainted With Words

       While this understanding of the purpose of materials is being developed, other important learnings are taking place. Perhaps the number one job for most teachers is helping children learn the techniques of remembering words so that unaided they can recognize them and really learn to read by themselves. This is an indispensable part of learning to read, but it best develops if it is acquired while the foregoing points with regard to reading environment and understanding guidance are also being nurtured.

Learning together.

       Let's look at this business of helping children master words and grow from two or seven word readers to book readers. A child who looks at a given word sees it as a design of lines going up and down, with some circles and components resembling circles. For a child, it does not necessarily have to be a group of letters in proper order. For example, Susette, who doesn't know a single letter, will go to the blackboard where a list of ten names is written, will point to her own and say, "This says Susette." Although she may not specifically recognize the prominent capital S, or the crossed T's, she knows and doesn't forget "Susette" she reads her name in the true sense of reading. Later, when she writes, the letters and their proper sequence become important. She doesn't have to be able to spell her name in order to read it. In the same manner she learns to recognize other words, some long like "Halloween," others short like "baby.” She sees them as distinctive pictures or patterns. 

        In a classroom, what one child knows is eagerly demonstrated to others: therefore there is a great exchange of learning. Bob will learn his name and Polly's too. Under the teacher's direction the children look at the words: "Today is Alice's birthday." The teacher helps them read what the words say. They discover which word is "Alice," which is "birthday." Looking at words, repeating them, and noticing their interesting features, such as length, height, number of letters repeated, similarity to other words known, is how words are recognized. Children remember words by meeting them often. 

       Equipped with only a minimum of words, a child is often eager to try the real business of reading a book. Simple books, the pre-primers, are published for this stage. Many first grade rooms are supplied with a dozen or more different pre-primers so that children will have ample experience in reading simple books. The teacher may read a short passage to two or three children as they look on; then they will try, with whatever memory and word recognition they are able to apply, to start reading a book! Again and again, a child rereads the one or more pages he has mastered. At this stage of reading growth every available older person is stopped and asked, "Do you want to hear me read?" And immediately after a first audition the adult is asked, "Do you want to hear me read it again?" This voluntary reading over and over again is the best kind of practice, and, interestingly enough, it is self-imposed by the child, if the relationship between child, other children, and adults is a friendly one.

       Do sight words right! Susan Jones Teaching channel talks about "how" to do sight words the scientific way. Learn to do Phoneme Mapping, Use a Multisensory Approach and Compare Sort Match.

Go here to download the Dolch Word Lists in English...

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