Teaching Children to Read

• July 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

According to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read Reports of the Subgroups, the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:

Foundational Skills for Beginning Readers:

1) Phonemic Awareness: The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of an alphabet.

2) Phonemic Decoding: The ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one's verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.

Skills Needed to Read for Meaning:

3) Vocabulary: Understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context.  For example, knowing that “tree” when reading about a “family tree” has a different meaning from “maple tree”

4) Fluency: The ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text and the text easily retained.

5) Comprehension: Thinking about the meaning of each segment of the text as it is read, building an understanding of the text as a whole, and reflecting on its meaning and message.

Teachers today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of scientifically based research into what works when teaching children to read.  The links that follow are courtesy of the National Institute for Literacy:

Birth to Early Childhood

Children begin building literacy skills long before they go to school.  Even very young children can be prepared to become successful readers later on.  Research has identified certain skills that are important for later literacy development; these skills include knowing the names and sounds of printed letters, manipulating speech sounds, and remembering what has been said for a short time.  Here are some ways to teach younger children these pre-reading skills.

Childhood

From kindergarten through third grade, young readers are actively developing all five of the core reading skills from phonemic awareness to fluency and comprehension.  Research has shown that teaching children to read successfully during this window requires a combination of strategies and instructional approaches.  Teachers must know how children learn to read and be able to tailor instructional approaches to individual children--especially those who are struggling readers.  Here are some instructional approaches for the five essential skills.

Adolescence

While many adolescent readers have mastered phonemic awareness and decoding, they are often still challenged to fully understand what they read.  In middle and high school, it is common for literacy skills to be developed not only in language arts courses, but also in a variety of different content areas.  To prepare students for the literacy challenges of secondary school, language arts and content area teachers need to focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  Here are some approaches to teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills.

What are some strategies you have used when teaching children to read?  Which have been most successful?  Share your expertise on our Scientific Learning Facebook page!

Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, intervention, learning through play, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension, reading intervention, struggling readers, struggling students, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, vocabulary

Traveling with a Toddler

• June 8, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Today in an airport lobby while watching many frustrated parents try to deal with fussy youngsters, a grandmother shared with me that when her youngest was 18 months old she took her on an airplane and her child acted "so terribly" that she refused to travel with her again until she was 18.

Nothing is more stressful for you or your toddler than a long car or plane ride. No matter how hard you try, a trip is a major break in your child’s normal routine. Meals, naps and regular bed times are very difficult to maintain on long trips. Once a toddler is out of his routine, he will be likely to become very cranky. And, since your toddler cannot move around and explore, which is what her developing body and mind long for, she will become very frustrated without any understanding of why.

As your toddler starts to cry and refuse to be comforted, you may feel embarrassed that you cannot control his behavior. That in turn may increase both your frustration and that of your child, and before you know it, the situation can be very difficult to reverse.

To avoid a cascading cycle of frustration and irritability, try switching gears. Start the trip with a well rested child, if at all possible. Bring a familiar blanket, doll or stuffed animal that your toddler associates with restful times. Avoid bringing electronic or noisy toys that stimulate your child. Come armed with favorite books, a few manipulables like blocks, familiar easy puzzles, and of course, a bottle or chew foods.

One of the problems on planes is that the air pressure changes that occur during take-off and landing actually cause ear aches so having something for your toddler to suck or chew on will relieve the air pressure buildup in the middle ear that causes an earache.

Plan on keeping your toddler occupied during the trip. As much as you may need to use the trip to read or relax yourself, plan things to do with your toddler that will occupy almost all of her time. When you can, get up and let your toddler walk up and down the aisles of the plane or if you are traveling by car, plan for plenty of “rest” stops which will actually end up being “run” stops. Your rest will come after the car or plane trip has ended and you put your child down for a nice long nap or sleep.

Some moving games/songs you can play with your toddler while seated on a car or plane ride are those that involve pointing to body parts while you sing softly like:

Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
And eyes, and ears and mouth and nose
Head shoulders knees and toes

Or every child’s favorite toe game:

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy went home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And, this little piggy cried Wee, Wee, Wee all the way home

Dolls that allow practice with snaps, buckles, and zippers can also provide some “doing” time.

Categories: Family Focus

Tags: attention, behavior, play, toddler

How Important is Memory in the Phonics Approach to Reading?

• April 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

All of us measure our intelligence, to some extent, by how well we remember things. When a young child enters school there is a tremendous premium on the ability to memorize. From learning the alphabet to memorizing math facts, success in school is measured by memory.

Parents intuitively understand this and encourage their children to demonstrate their mnemonic skills. Reciting a poem, repeating the alphabet, counting to 100, or listing other facts like state capitals, can be a badge of “knowledge” that parents will ask their children to perform to demonstrate their intellectual prowess. But, sadly, many children who are significantly behind in some aspects of development can recite and memorize.

It is interesting, that from a neuroscience perspective, memorization is not really a very advanced skill. Memorization of facts, poems, or lists is accomplished by one of the most primitive and, from an evolutionary perspective, oldest parts of the brain, the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is a horseshoe-shaped area situated deep in the center of the brain in one of the oldest parts of the brain, the medial temporal lobe. All animals with a spinal cord have a hippocampus.

Most brain scientists regard the hippocampus as the part of the brain that allows us to learn anything new. And, in fact, when it is permanently damaged in humans, they become unable to learn anything new although they can recite without error information they learned before this part of the brain was damaged. So, it turns out that the hippocampus is like the “tape recorder” of our brain. It enables us to memorize new information but does not appear to be essential for retrieving information we learned years ago or information we know well.¹

A great deal of learning in the elementary grades involves the hippocampus. Memorization of spelling rules likes “i before e except after c,” math facts, reading of “sight” words that cannot be sounded out, and geographical facts, just to name a few, demand good memorization skills (hippocampus function.). Reading curriculum used before 1970, like those used when the goal was memorization of the “Dolch” sight words, also stressed memorization skills.²

Children who were not particularly good at memorization in the 1950’s or 1960’s were at a great disadvantage in the early grades. But the 1980’s ushered in a new approach to reading, phonics. The phonics approach to teaching reading went through a slight reversal in the 1980’s and early 1990’s with an academic approach called “total language” that stressed reading speed and ease through use of contextual information like pictures and story³ familiarity, but the phonics-based approaches are now quite strong in most American academic curricula as research pointed to its overall superiority for teaching young readers.

The phonics reading approach places far fewer demands on memorization because a child can read many words without having to memorize them. But phonics does require a kind of memory – working memory – that involves a much more advanced part of the brain and is different from memorization.

¹There is considerable debate about how important the hippocampus is in retrieval of different types of stored information. Squire, et al., discuss some of this debate in an excellent summary article: Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8, 872–883 (1 November 2007) | doi:10.1038/nrn2154

2 Anyone who was educated with “Dick and Jane” books was taught to memorize a list of Dolch sight words at each grade level.

3 The National Research Council now recommends that all reading curricula in U.S. schools stress phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary building.

Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, learning to read, literacy, memory, phonics, teacher impact

Success in School

• March 2, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

What advice can neuroscience offer a parent who would like to prepare their child to be successful in school, career and life?  Probably the most important advice is that success is a relative term that each parent must decide how to define.

Not all children can be valedictorians of their high school class, so if a parent decides that this is the academic goal for their child, most will be sorely disappointed. But there is no limit to the percentage of students who can graduate. Nor is there a limit to the number who can leave high school with a career goal in mind. Certainly, there is no limit to the number of high school seniors who can be accepted to a college or university of their choice. And finally, and perhaps the most important when the goal is perpetuating the species, the individual must be able to work with and sustain positive relationships with others.

In the United States today, high school degrees are no longer sufficient to guarantee financial stability and security, so pursuit of a career that necessitates some form of higher education is a worthwhile goal for parents. For a child to reach that goal there are specific requirements. First and foremost, an individual must be able to read fluently and adequately comprehend what they read. Unfortunately, however, learning to read is not easy for all children. There are prerequisite cognitive capacities that a child needs to be a fluent reader. Second, an individual must be able to handle numbers and understand basic numerical concepts so that he or she can earn and manage money, understand debt and monetary risk and balance a budget. Third, an individual must be able to get along with others, maintain intimate relationships and learn to manage other people to attain group goals.

Upon high school graduation, most parents would like their brain child to have a map for this future: career goals, security goals and relationship goals. Career goals will come through academic success and a work ethic, security will be achieved through ability to earn and manage money, and relationship goals will be attained through social skill attainment.

The valuable information that parents can glean from brain science is that each of these goals is attainable for all of your children. The remarkable thing is that the human brain is actually designed to achieve all of these. In most cases, a parent need only to follow his or her natural parental instincts and provide an environment rich in language and conducive to experimentation to achieve these goals.

In essence, raising a “brain child” simply requires talking to and playing with your infant. The magic here is that the human brain evolved under the circumstances that language and play actually build brain structures that support academic success and social success. Because the brain evolved over thousands of years, parents do not need, nor is it helpful, to expose very young children to television, or cell phones, or iPods or Baby Einstein. The brain is designed to develop very well when it is exposed to very simple and time-tested information like nursery rhymes, nursery songs, play routines, cuddling and play.

Categories: Brain Fitness

Tags: academic success, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, learning through play

Are "Smart" Kids Born Smart?

• February 4, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Did you ever know someone that others referred to as a “brain”? It is a term most commonly used in a school environment referring to a top student. Often the “brain” did not seem to have to work hard at school; he or she was viewed as naturally intelligent, knowledgeable in many subjects, liked by teachers and admired by fellow students. Did you ever wonder how that person got that way? Most likely you thought, as did most experts in psychology, the field that assesses intelligence, that he or she was just “born” smart. 

Until very recently, intelligence was viewed as a fixed innate capacity, a genetic gift from mom and dad that more or less propelled a child on their way to success in school then ultimately success in life. But it turns out, that intelligence is not as fixed as was previously thought nor is it preset by a person’s genetic inheritance.  There are many variables that affect intelligence as it is measured by tests, measured in school, and measured in life.  

Current neuroscience research suggests that most newborn infants are born with the potential to achieve in many cognitive areas. There will be some genetic predispositions, but the child’s brain is extraordinarily malleable and “teachable”. One could say that the job of the infant brain is to figure out, from what is going on around him or her, what skills and sensory abilities it will be important to master. Once the basics are established the child’s brain will set out on a path to become an expert in those areas. 

By stimulating their child in certain ways, parents set the stage for the infant brain to begin a developmental trajectory that will influence what the child becomes “smart” at – science, math, music, art, athletics, reading, writing, cooking, care-taking, this list is almost endless – and guide preferences the child will demonstrate throughout life.

Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, brain plasticity, early learning, how children learn, intelligence

Your Child's Amazing Brain

• January 29, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Did you know that human beings are the only animals on our planet whose babies require 13 to 14 years to mature? Anthropologists now believe that the reason for this is the size of our brain. 

To provide a child’s remarkable brain ample time to mature takes up about one fifth of our life. What this means is that the time your child spends living with you is critical to the shape of his brain for the rest of his life. You actually have a great deal of control over your child’s “brain power” by building the brain’s super highway system and then paving the highways and byways that will allow your child to select among a variety of adult vocations and live a fulfilling life. 

But, interestingly, although the childhood period is quite long, you need not try to fill every day with meaningful activities for your child – her brain is actually designed to extract and use the information that her early life contains to build itself. Your child’s brain is a learning machine that will utilize interactions with you and other adults as well as experiences within the environment to create a scaffolding that will prepare her first for school and then for life as a productive adult and social expert. 

Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, brain plasticity, early learning, how children learn