Helping kids crack the code

Kristine Beale's son Logan, now 8, was "a reluctant reader" in first grade. As a home-schooling parent who also worked as a teacher for several years, Beale could see that Logan was struggling. Typically an outgoing little boy, Logan would hesitate to read aloud to her as his frustration grew.

After attending a home-schooling workshop on phonics by private tutor and home-schooling parent Kathy Fears of Mounds View, Beale decided that concentrated phonics training might be just what her son needed. She was right.

"There was a light switch that clicked on in his head. He went from simple readers to grade-level books in just a short time after he started working with Kathy," said Beale. "It was like he suddenly had a set of decoding skills for reading."

While many experts use the term "cracking the code" when it comes to kids and reading, the process can vary greatly from child to child at a time when there is considerable pressure to get all kids reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade. As an offshoot of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Minnesota started an initiative called Reading First (based on a national model) to achieve those goals.

So what's the best way for kids to crack the code? While most kids are exposed to print from a young age via the alphabet and storybooks, many experts believe it is really the letter and word sounds -- phonics -- that provide the best path for deciphering the elements of reading.

With an emphasis on visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning, the Orton-Gillingham method is one phonetic program being used by public, private and home-schooling teachers nationwide. It employs multisensory skills to engage children in reading.

"Most reading programs rely on visual techniques, but this approach teaches children to trace letters with their fingers in sand or salt, segment words into sounds and blend sounds together," said Fears, who became trained in Orton-Gillingham when one of her children, now in college, was a struggling reader at age 10.

"If children learn through seeing, hearing and saying letters, all their learning pathways are being used."

Hearing, touching language

Although young children typically enter the world of reading by attempting to memorize the ABCs, Sheila Moore, a former Montessori teacher from Virginia and author of a new picture book called "Abadaba Alphabet" (Abadaba Reading, LLC), believes learning the letters of the alphabet by sight is definitely not the best place for children to begin.

"Children have a much more immediate entry into literacy if they learn the letter sounds before they learn letter names," said Moore. "The standard belief is that kids have to know the order of the alphabet first, and they don't."

In her experience working as a tutor with struggling first-grade readers, Moore discovered that the biggest impediment for her students was making the transition from letter names to letter sounds.

"The fact is that by the age of around 4, children start to become interested in words and reading," Moore said. "If they are in preschool, that's the time when they are taught letter names instead of sounds, so that becomes their first knowledge."

The Montessori method of teaching children to assimilate letter sounds and words also focuses on multisensory learning, as Montessori experts believe language builds in a variety of ways.

"We present letters in cursive form, and the children trace them slowly with their fingers while they sound them out at the same time," said Molly O'Shaughnessy, director of training at the Montessori Training Center of Minnesota in St. Paul. "We encourage all the senses. If we were just to use reading books, it would be hard for children to connect meaning."

Children learn shapes and sounds before there is any attempt to form letters into words. Key to the process is hearing phonograms, common sounds in speech, such as -ack, -eat, -ight, and so on. There are 37 common phonograms, and once the child learns these patterns, they are able to master a vocabulary of approximately 500 words.

"We give children as young as 3 years old the keys to language by encouraging them to explore sounds. They don't have to learn them, because they already know them," O'Shaughnessy said. "Everything begins with the spoken language."

To Fears, weekly spelling lists don't effectively meet the goal of teaching words. Lists encourage kids to memorize words, and about 30 percent of kids can figure out that code, she said -- but once kids master the sounds and phonograms, they will know how to spell a word without ever seeing it.

An example she uses with her students is the word "frond."This is a very uncommon word, but once a child knows the short 'o' sound, they can figure it out easily," Fears said.

Rhyme, reason and reading

Bonnie Houck, reading specialist for the Minnesota Department of Education, said phonemic awareness occurs for most children well before they start school. "This is one of the tools kindergarten teachers use to assess reading readiness in their students," said Houck. "For instance, can the child identify that there are three sounds in the word 'cat'?"

Because the learning process varies with each child, Houck said that while K-1 students are constantly evaluated by teachers, a formal assessment of reading skills doesn't take place until the spring of a child's first-grade year.

A good place for parents to begin preparing very young children to learn words is by introducing word sounds through rhymes and songs, because the more exposure they have to rhyming, the more easily they will be able to distinguish sounds when the time comes for them to read.

"Children love rhyming books at story hour," said Gretchen Wronka, youth services librarian and outreach coordinator for Hennepin County Library. "It's an opportunity for them to absorb the language in an energetic and interactive way with their parent or caregiver."

Parents might be surprised at how quickly children move from rhymes to "cracking the code" on their own, as Rachel Morris' 5-year-old son Noah, a student at Highland Park Montessori in St. Paul, recently demonstrated. Morris said that Noah is suddenly much more enthusiastic about reading since figuring out how words work together to form sentences.

"We had a whole discussion at dinner the other night about conjunctions," Morris said. "He's much more eager to pick up a book than he was just a few months ago. He calls himself 'a really good reader,' and I think what's happened is that everything has just clicked in his mind. He knows he can do it."