Some of you are here for a set of tips mentioned on a card, but this article begins with an introduction that includes a true story about two students.  If you’re in a hurry to get to the tips, you can skip down to Tips For Parents, but remember, the introduction is also informative.

Without careful well-ordered reading instruction, most children  have trouble learning to read from left to right consistently. They skip letters, issue guesses, sometimes read backwards, and also confuse ‘b’ with ‘d.’  Like taking on the job of “parent,” taking responsibility for a child’s education—especially his or her reading education—is a daunting prospect for most. 

It’s tempting to “leave reading instruction up to the experts.”  That would be a great idea… if only they were really experts.  Most elementary teachers care about their students.  They want to do better, but they have many rules to follow.  They can’t choose the reading programs they use.  For the most part, they can’t make big changes to the reading programs foisted upon them by their bosses.  They’re also very busy with reporting tasks, grading homework, lesson planning, and meetings.  They quickly learn to ignore certain curriculum problems and blame children for the mistakes those curriculum problems trigger year after year.

Tips For Parents

aaa a For starters, let me flesh out the tips you may have already seen on one of our cards:

1. Read to your child daily. Most parents do it at bedtime. It tells your child that you care about reading, about him or her, and about education in general. Keep going until your child is years ahead of his peers.

2. Ignore your child’s reading comprehension level. You should be reading stories that are slightly above your child’s listening comprehension level. That translates to any vocabulary and grammar he can understand with occasional explanations from you. This practice helps grow his vocabulary and his or her grammatical sophistication. It becomes a savings account in memory that will help with your child’s schooling as he or she grows.

3. Don’t read with your child. Every parent and child combination is different, but in general, reading with your child is risky. You should take all the responsibility for identifying words and reading smoothly. Some children can learn to read by reading along with their parents, but they’re somewhat rare. The rest are likely to become very confused if they pay too much attention to what you’re doing. English letter patterns (like nation, champ, & nice) should be studied separately—not jumbled together for the purpose of telling a good story. There is no 3-letter word for elephant, so you should take charge of reading. Don’t point to the words.

4. The above is not a hard and fast rule. You child’s reading aptitude could be way above average. Some kids just listen for a few months, then start correcting their parents: “No mommy, that says predisposed, not “prednisone.” On the other hand, if your child’s reading aptitude is just slightly below average, you’re not going to be able to teach him or her reading without sophisticated tools and some training. Without some sort of intervention, he or she is also at high risk of running into trouble later on. If your child’s reading aptitude is well below average, you’ll need an expert just to make progress.

5. Who’s struggling?? If a teacher says something like, “your child is struggling with reading,” take a deep breath, and remember: HALF of the students in Georgia are behind by the end of third grade… half. The odds are high that your child’s school “struggles” with teaching Reading. Many of my tutoring customers have children with reading aptitudes that are either average or above average. Your child’s teacher can’t say, “your child is struggling with reading and so are 56% of his classmates,” so she doesn’t.

6. Still Tempted To Teach Your Child Yourself? It’s worth a try. If you want to go down that path, we have some crucial do’s and don’ts available here.

7. Monitor Your School. You saw the statistics above. Plan on showing up during reading instruction until your child is reading on a 4th grade level or is half a year ahead. Reading instruction typically takes place around 10:00 AM. Reading skills can go south pretty quickly, so drop in every two months or so. Be sure to get permission first. Things have been pretty weird lately. You don’t have to monitor this way, but a child can get very far behind in reading before any parents are told.

8. If you have trouble getting permission to monitor during reading instruction, offer to withdraw your child. If that doesn’t work, do it immediately. Don’t trust schools with secrets.

9. Ask the teacher and her assistant (AKA, her “para”) every question you can think of. Don’t ask yes-or-no questions. Memorize this one: “What reading issues are you seeing in my child?” With very rare exceptions, all reading beginners have the same 3-4 reading issues. The difference between children is the rate at which they overcome these issues: Many children are still rank beginners in the middle of second or third grade. 

10. Here are the answers you should hear; don’t be alarmed.
    The four main American reading issues are…

    A) Failure to read from left to right
    This habit is very hard to learn for most children. I saw one teacher get really nasty with a child who couldn’t do it. Understandably, the child preferred working with me. She was in kindergarten. Her reading aptitude was average, but it was a private school with many above-average children. The left-to-right issue has important roots in memory formation and recall, but I should stop here.

    B) Difficulty blending letter sounds together.
    When kids are sounding out words, it’s common to hear /f/ /ee/ /t/… “fish!” When blending is slow or slightly off, the child doesn’t recognize the word. What follows is always a guess. Guessing is normal. In fact, most Georgia reading programs encourage it. Guessing is also bad. It should never be encouraged—especially with long lists of so-called “sight” words. The chance of a correct guess quickly drops below one in a thousand as vocabulary rises at 5000 words per year.

    C) Difficulty recalling letter sounds quickly and accurately. The sound of any given letter in written English is highly dependent on the surrounding letters. This makes letter sound memorization even harder. Most children need several
    thousand exposures to the same letter before they can recall its main sound instantly.

    D) Failure to pay attention to the right things at the right times during reading instruction.
    American schools start teaching reading too early. In kindergarten and first grade, the vast majority of children are still having great difficulty paying attention to lectures about anything. The phrase “distractible children” is certainly redundant. In addition, the logical part of the brain barely functions at this age. One wag noted that children who can focus on a video game for 30 minutes at a stretch can (almost certainly) learn to read. It is possible for a child to have a very high reading
    aptitude and a very short attention span. Your teacher may not be able to detect this type of situation. Such a child learns quickly, but only when looking in the right direction at the right time while also listening. These problems are minimal in
    Reading on Rails™ .

11. All… All
If your child’s teacher does not report some of the above four problems, something is out of whack because all reading beginners have all of these problems. Maybe your child is not a beginner anymore. He or she could be way ahead. Yay! In that case,
your child is probably already reading to you. (You should still read to him or her—just at a higher level.) If your child is in the middle of the pack, the teacher may be afraid to express his or her fears and specific observations. The middle of the pack is not a good place to be. Plenty of children start there, then gradually drift to the rear as the pack leaders pull away like Teslas. Early reading successes and failures (sources of pride & frustration respectively) shape lifelong attitudes towards reading. Pride promotes reading practice. Frustration and worry suppress practice. For maximum self-esteem and a good attitude about reading, you want your child to be in the top third of the class.

12. To monitor your child’s progress, have him read to you once in awhile.
    Your child should read to you daily if he or she is in the middle of the pack or behind. Schools introduce “engaging stories” to reading beginners as early as possible. The philosophy is that these stories help keep children interested in reading.
    There are some disadvantages to this practice. Here’s the most serious one: When a child who isn’t ready tries to
    read an interesting story, he reads slowly and haltingly. He is heavily focused on sounding out each individual
    letter and therefore can’t focus on what the sentences actually mean. This teaches a bad habit. Children think,
    If a sentence doesn’t make sense, you should just keep going. Actually, when a sentence doesn’t make sense, the child should re-read the sentence, looking for his mistake. As you listen to your child reading, stop him or her whenever something doesn’t make sense. If you hear lots of errors, just have your child explain each sentence after he or she reads it to instill the re-reading habit.

13. Someday Bristol Standard will have software that supports teaching children to read. Until then, your best bet is fighting the urge to teach your child. You can always call us for advice along these lines. Many popular techniques work against you. Don’t promote memorization because it ignores letter sounds and letter order. It also promotes guessing whenever a short word is in view. Typical children’s stories (like those found in Dr. Seuss books and thousands more) have too much
letter variety and far too little repetition for most children. I love Dr. Seuss, especially his story about the Lorax, but it’s not ideal for most kids. Story reading starts when your child can sound out nearly all of the words in a story. Don’t teach capital letters. There’s only one capital per sentence. Don’t teach the alphabet/”letter names.” They’re not used in reading, so they cause endless confusion.