Native Reading

Timothy Kailing's book Native Reading: Teach Your Child to Read Easily and Naturally Before the Age of 3 has really inspired me to create a text-rich environment for my children. I know some of you are thinking "How artificial and stiff!"

I’m not talking about taping a label on every object in the house, though. That would be artificial and stiff. I’m talking about learning to read without explicitly being taught, through sharing books and playing games.

The major methods to “teaching” reading in the Native Reading method are text pointing, letter play, and word assembly. This is what is meant by creating a text-rich environment.

There should be letters and words in the child’s environment. There should be a shelf filled with sturdy books, available to be read. Parents should read with the child. Letter toys like blocks, foam bath letters that stick when wet, and refrigerator magnet letters should be openly accessible.

Text pointing is running your finger under the text while reading, as fluidly as possible, making sure to smoothly keep even with each word as you pronounce it. This is harder than it sounds, but it becomes easy with practice! You should also do this with some of the text you encounter outside of books, like signs and labels.

Letter play is using those letter toys to play games. Name the letters on each block as you build a tower. When it topples point out which letter made it fall. Put letter magnets in the right order and then sing the alphabet song. Search for letters, by making a big silly production out of hunting through the bubbles for certain foam bath letters and proudly exclaiming when you find them.

Word assembly is using those letter toys to make words. Spell “bubbles” with the foam letters in the bath. Line up the ABC blocks to spell “blocks”. Use the magnets to spell “chicken”, “bread”, “spoon” and “juice” while you’re cooking dinner.

These methods can also be combined together, with different books and letter toys, to make as many games as you can imagine. Build a block tower that spells your child’s name. Buy a bath-safe book and use the foam letters to form a word or two from the book as you read it. Assemble the word “fork” in the kitchen with magnets, then remove the k and point out the new word “for”. Add a t and make “fort”. The possibilities are endless.

Learning to Read the Charlotte Mason Way

Since I believe my children will benefit from Charlotte Mason's approach to education, I set out to find what she had to say about learning to read. Her book Home Education, the first of her series, offers a method of teaching reading. The description begins near page 207.

When a child begins to read, he is already familiar with real books and reading because his parents have read to him daily from the time he was very small. He already knows the names of the letters and the sounds they make. He has been exposed to “letter squares”; modern-day equivalents would be letter blocks, foam bath letters, and letter magnets. He also has a very large vocabulary. Finally, he understands that letters make up words and that written words have meanings just as spoken words do.

The actual teaching is a combination of phonics and sight reading. It begins by choosing a short, repetitive piece, a nursery rhyme or a page from a children’s book. His mother gives a lesson, made up of different games.

· She writes the words for him.

· He studies each word and names the letters in it.

· He forms the words from letters.

· He finds the words in a “word bank” made up of all the words in the selection, written on slips of paper.

· He finds the words in the selection.

In this way, for each phrase or set of a few words, he learns the entire selection. After he knows all the words by sight, his mother can begin another set of games.

· She dictates the entire selection as he finds the words in his “bank”.

· He assembles the entire rhyme, line by line, from the words written on slips of paper.

· He reads the entire rhyme himself.

Later his mother can make a simple phonics lesson on word-building, based on the words he has learned in the selection. If he learned the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”, from the word pail she can use loose letters to form snail, mail, tail, fail, etc.

This lesson doesn’t have to be done all at once! Charlotte Mason believed that lessons should be short, and if the child’s attention started to wander, it should immediately be put away. If your child is wiggling out of his seat after only one phrase, stop! Go outside and play for 15 minutes. Come back to it later. Let him get muddy and then review the three words he did learn with foam letters in the tub. Plan to spend an entire week on one nursery rhyme if you think that’s reasonable.

You could buy a thick Mother Goose volume, a set of bath letters, and some cardstock, scissors, and a Sharpie (to make the word banks) to form an entire reading curriculum. If your Mother Goose contains 52 rhymes and you only learned one per week plus the word building game after each lesson, your child would be a capable reader at the end of the year. If he’s learning to write too, show him how to write the letters as you come across them in your rhymes.

· Write in pencil and let him trace in crayon.

· Write them hand-over-hand.

· Type out the poem in a large font, print and slide it into a page protector, and let him trace with a dry-erase marker. It wipes right off! There are even fonts available for download that include guide arrows to help him form the letters correctly, and free worksheet generator sites where you can type in what you want the sheet to say. Gray printed words and a black marker would probably make it easiest to see how well he’s tracing.

· When he’s confident of the letters, write a word at the top of a page and have him copy on the lines below. Those worksheet generators are great for this too.

There is your low-cost, customized Charlotte Mason reading and writing curriculum!