Patience, patience, patience… in teaching reading — letter-sound correspondence always first
Patience is one of the most important attributes a reading teacher must have. Something I realised most acutely during this time of online learning. Not just for children, however. But also for their parents.
I, fortunately, have an unlimited fountain of patience specially reserved for budding Reception readers, and fortunately again, this extends to their parents and aunties at home who do not seem to have it for their own children.
Learning to read through zoom sessions rather than in a physical classroom, as we all have surmised already, has many challenges. Where before my Reception children could take advantage of my enlightened use of waiting time, now they are hurried along by parents and other caregivers who are seated by their sides, who either tell them the letter names, say the sounds for them, or worse, read the word in question. Of course, a solution for this is to have had a Parent’s Phonics Talk especially on the topic of providing appropriate support to the students at home during this time of Covid-19. Although, I very much doubt that everyone would understand what we would like for them to do right away, as even ‘experienced’ class teachers could not help answering for their students during my early teaching days. Yet unqualified, inexperienced and at that time without my acquired repertoire of teaching knowledge, skills, and critical thinking, I already thought it was common sense to not say the answers we are eliciting from our students.
I am writing to reflect on my teaching day today. I have been thinking of a way to tactfully remind parents and helpers how it is not beneficial at all to answer on behalf of their children or charges. It is always awkward to ‘remind’ the children to ‘not ask mummy for help’ when I meant to ‘remind’ the parent or helper to not answer for the child.
For children who haven’t yet learnt how to identify letters by their sounds with automaticity, some teachers and parents think that the solution is to give them the sounds and read the words for them. This only compounds and prolongs the problem and the child’s overwhelm. No matter how many times we volunteer the sounds for them, they will still be unable to independently read words even if they could blend. Recognising letters by their sounds, not names, is the first and crucial task to master. If children cannot blend or decode words because of an inconsistent recall of letter sounds, it is to re-learning letter sounds we must return. And for this, we must have patience with ourselves, the children, and their parents. It will look like to you and to the parents that you are back at square one, but believe me, the slow (and thorough letter-sounds) lane is the fastest way to reading fluency.
