The Between the Lions (R) Book for Parents: Everything You Need to Know to Help Your Child Learn to Read

Chapter One

What Is Reading?

As parents, we come face-to-faceevery day with mystery. Howdoes that tiny baby figure out,without being told, how to roll over, sit up,crawl, and walk? Where did your preschoolerlearn all those words and how to put themtogether? How can your third-grader programthe VCR when you can't? And who left thosecookie crumbs all over the floor?

We can't help you with the cookiecrumbs?although, let's face it, you probablydon't need Sherlock Holmes to figure that oneout - but we can offer some useful information,guidance, and encouragement about oneof the great mysteries of childhood: what isreading, and how is my kid ever going to learnto do it? Especially in our society, where somuch of a person's success seems to depend on his ability to do well in school, parents canfeel anxious about whether their children havewhat it takes to learn to read. So here's thefirst thing you need to know: just about everychild, given the right support and instruction,will learn to read. And, for struggling readers,there's a lot you can do to help.

Just by picking up this book, you'vealready demonstrated that you're doing thething that matters most. You care about yourchild's reading, and you want to help himlearn. Your loving support and guidance, morethan anything else, will motivate your childand help him find his way toward being areader. And because you're a reader yourself - you're reading right now, aren't you? - you'reprobably also already doing the one thing thatresearchers universally emphasize as a key tochildren's reading: you're reading to yourchild. That one simple act, more than anythingelse you do, builds your child's understandingof books, his grasp of language, and his desireto read for himself. Give him those buildingblocks, and you've already given him much ofwhat he needs to become a reader.

Of course, he'll still have plenty to learnabout the details of the process: how letters representsounds, how sounds go together to makewords, how words combine to form sentences,and how sentences add up to a meaningfulwhole. But those details are just that: details.They're also small, specific skills that build onand reinforce each other, and that your childwill put together one by one to solve the largerpuzzle: discovering meaning. That's the point,always, of reading: to make a connectionbetween the words on the page and what theymean - and, by doing so, to make a deeper connectionbetween the reader and the world. Reading accurately is important, but what'sreally important is making that connection.And by setting your child in your lap with abook, you're helping him learn how to connect.You're giving him the big picture - a warm andwelcoming context into which he can fit all thebits of knowledge about books and reading thathe'll assemble in his years at school.

What Happens When You Read?

If you're the kind of person who likes to knowthe fine points of how things work, check outthe box "Reading: The Fine Print," whichdetails the current thinking about how ourbrains decipher print. But, just as you don'tneed to be able to explain how an engineworks in order to drive a car, you don't needto know everything about the visual, neurological,and psychological elements of the actof reading in order to help your child learn toread. What can help (to extend that drivingmetaphor for just a moment) is to knowenough to be able to tell when you might behaving engine trouble. So, very briefly, let'slook under the hood.

This is trickier than it might seem.Researchers have learned a lot in the past fewdecades about how reading works, but they'restill figuring out some of the details. That'sbecause reading is something a skilled readerdoes swiftly, silently, and internally. Even if youtry to observe the process in yourself, it'salmost impossible to see just how you do it. Forthis reason, many people assumed for a longtime that skilled readers don't sound words outas they read and that they probably skip words,just focusing on the important ones.

In fact, all of those assumptions have nowbeen proved to be more or less wrong. Believeit or not, skilled readers look at almost everyletter of every word, and their brains attend tothe sound as well as the appearance of whatthey read. We think we read with our eyes, andof course our eyes are part of the process. Butwhat's even more important is the language-processingability of our brains. Reading is alanguage skill more than a visual one - animportant point to keep in mind as you read inthe chapters to come about what instructionyour child should receive and which skills it'smost valuable to help him develop at home.

Reading, just like learning to read, is a processthat starts with small building blocks andgradually assembles them to form a largerwhole. Your eye begins with a collection oflines and curves that it assembles into a letter;your brain takes that bit of data and assemblesit with others to form syllables, then words,then sentences, then paragraphs, then books.In the same way, when your child is learningto read, he assembles what he learns about lettersto build his ability to read words, thenputs his knowledge of words together to figureout how to comprehend sentences and thetext as a whole. In both processes, knowledgeis the goal, but it cannot exist without thesmooth assembly of its tiniest parts ...

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Excerpted from The Between the Lionsby Rath, Linda K. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Copyright © 2003 Thomas Von Essen
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