J. Richard Gentry, Ph.D., a former university professor and elementary school teacher, is author of Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write-From Baby to Age 7 (Da Capo Press/Lifelong Books). His other books include The Science of Spelling (Heinemann) as well as a popular spelling textbook series for grades K-8, Spelling Connections (Zaner-Bloser).

He can be reached at his homepage, www.JRichardGentry.com.

Advantages of Early Education with Little Reader

by J. Richard Gentry, Ph.D.

A new software-driven early education program called Little Reader makes it easy for any parent to teach their child to read during the preschool years. It's fun and natural, requiring only about five or ten minutes a day with a parent and child interacting at the computer along with good old-fashioned lap reading.

Babies and toddlers are hard-wired for early reading, but few parents give them the right stimulation to make early reading easy and fun. It's time for a cultural change among parents who put off reading practice with their kids until formal instruction starts in school. Take advantage of a window of opportunity for early reading open to all children from birth to age 5 or 6.

Most parents and even some educators don't understand that the young child's brain is hard-wired for early reading, but advances in brain imaging are changing that misconception. Scientist Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and her colleagues have shown images of white matter in the 9-month-old brain connecting areas used for talking, grammar, reading, and social interaction with areas for listening and understanding. Dr. Kuhl reports that the track that connects areas of the brain used for reading is present in infants before 12 months of age.1

Learning to Read Is Like Learning Languages

Baby/toddler readers aren't just geniuses with special capacities; every child's brain appears to be wired for early reading, just as it's wired for learning language. The window of opportunity for acquiring languages is understood to be between 0 and 7, when virtually any language you put in front of a child can be acquired with great skill. In fact, babies and toddlers can learn

languages better and more easily than adults. Beyond age 7, the language-learning skill diminishes. While a new language can be learned after age 7 - just as one can learn to read later in life - it's learned differently and not automatically or with the same ease of production. When a parent or caregiver stimulates the reading brain through social interaction, babies and toddlers who crack the reading code likely use special brain-based computational skills similar to the way they crack the speech code and build concepts and vocabulary. 2

Waiting until age 6 to learn to read presents problems, especially in America where 88% of poor readers in first grade will be poor readers in fourth grade. 3 The root of the problem is that one third of the kids entering kindergarten aren’t ready for success with reading. They haven't reached the first pivotal benchmark for beginning reading: They can’t write their names, clap out syllables, name some letters, recognize even a few words in print, or tell about a favorite book that has been read to them over and over. 4 This year in America, 33% or about 1.5 million children entered kindergarten without these preschool skills. Why? Because nobody taught them at home.

Learning to Read at Age 6 Isn’t Easy

Teaching reading for a 6-year-old nonreader through formal instruction requires a specially trained teacher. Learning to read at 6 and older requires formal reading lessons and the child has to have stamina along with the type of logical, deductive thinking that is quite challenging for kids who haven’t had a lot of preschool exposure to literacy. 5

Little Reader is just the tool kit the parent or preschool teacher needs to introduce reading early and easily. It provides an easy-to-follow informal curriculum designed to be used daily but only for five or ten minutes. Parents delight as babies and toddlers move from reading words, to couplets, to phrases, to sentences, to easy little stories - all at the child’s own pace. Baby/toddler reading brains soak reading up like a sponge, not by force, formal lessons, or deductive reasoning, but with repetition of word and book reading as fun interactions with their parents.

Why Not Just Lap Read?

Reading aloud and talking to preschoolers is fundamental, but lap reading or bedtime stories may not be sufficient to enable young children to pick up reading. Longitudinal results from a recent study show that drawing attention to print in explicit ways during book reading to preschoolers enhanced the child's reading, comprehension, and spelling scores two years later. 6 Little Reader includes just what is needed for this task. Along with wonderful easy books for lap reading and reading aloud, it provides brief software-driven word games giving parents exactly the tool they need to build their child's language, concept, vocabulary, and word reading via short focused attention to printed words.

With Little Reader the child experiences printed words as meaningful discrete units that map to spoken sounds through engaging pictures, animation, and voice. It's not just a flash word program, which many parents would find distasteful. The Little Reader presentation can be customized and personalized so that the baby's or toddler's first words can be pictures and sounds from baby's own world: baby's nose, Mommy's hair, Grandpa waving to baby in a family video, though he's 1,000 miles away, or favorite pics and video of the child's dog, cat, or gerbil. The possibilities are limitless, meaningful, and fun with downloads and uploads as easy as taking images from a cell phone.

Little Reader is a wonderful way to introduce kids to technology. Beyond that, it provides a forum that allows parents from all over the world to share content that they have created for free. Is your toddler fascinated with dinosaurs, butterflies, or dump trucks? You can get lots of free content on almost any topic that parents of other toddlers are sharing-all with just a click. Free downloads are also available of word games in many different languages.

Where Are Your Baby's Eyes Looking?

It's well established that children don't learn to read by looking at the pictures or at Mommy's or Daddy's face during lap reading. 7 Little Reader uses overt means to evoke the child's visual and verbal attention to the printed word, making this important quality of first good teaching easy for parents because attention to word properties is built directly into word games. For example, it's easy for parents to increase the child's attention to print with Little Reader's subtle introduction of letter-sound correspondence and left-to-right directionality of spelling. Parents make sure the child's eyes are in the right spot for reading simply by pointing to a cursor that tracks a word's spelling from left to right on the computer screen. The child's brain and special capacity for pattern recognition does the rest. Little Reader word games get the child's attention focused just in the right place at the right time.

What about Phonics?

A program component called Pattern Phonics™ makes sure that early readers get the exposure to spelling patterns that is needed for toddlers to "pick up" knowledge of phonics patterns. How toddlers do this is not well understood, but it likely involves capacities for pattern recognition and inductive learning. It does not involve the deductive memorization of phonics rules and applications associated with formal instruction. That's much too hard for toddlers.

To take advantage of this window of opportunity for picking up on patterns, both phonemic awareness of sounds and phonics are built into the spiraling Little Reader curriculum. Kids learn chunks of letter-sound correspondence just as they inductively learn the rules of grammar when learning to speak in phrases and sentences. That is to say, they learn to apply phonics rules by experiencing printed language in use, rather than by having the rules explained or by consciously deducing the rules. Along with the word games, engaging illustrated little stories contrasting words and patterns such as pink pig, pig wig, two pigs, and two wigs enable kids to intuit letter-sound correspondences for letters such a p, w, the ending s sound, and the –ig and –ink chunk.  By 2 or 3 years of age, many early readers astonish their parents as they begin to use pattern phonics to unlock words they have never seen.  

The Best Thing about Little Reader Is the Bonding Experience

Teaching early reading requires intimate physical contact, such as snuggling with a book or cuddling with the baby or toddler at the computer. Perhaps the best thing about Little Reader is that it builds positive parent-child social interactions and expands opportunity for the parent and the child to talk and have fun with books, concepts, and words. Everything the parent needs is right there in the kit - just pick it up and interact. The program isn't about a computer or DVD teaching a baby to read - it's a tool for parent-child bonding and fun with literacy.

I've been teaching beginning reading for thirty years. Little Reader is the best product I've seen for putting the parent in the driver's seat and making it easy to teach a preschool child to read. When you put early reading in front of your child, you launch a successful academic future and give yourself piece of mind. Let Little Reader help you give your child the gift of reading.

1 Education Nation, Dr. Patricia Kuhl and Dr. Andrew Meltzoff on Brain Power: Why Early Learning Matters.

2 Patricia Kuhl, “Cracking the Speech Code: Language and the Infant Brain” Pinkel Lecture, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. April 16, 2010. For the full lecture go to http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/pinkel/lectures/kuhl/index.shtml.

3 Connie Juel, Learning to Read and Write: A Longitudinal Study of 54 Children from First Through
Fourth Grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80 (4) 443–47. 1988.

4 J. Richard Gentry, Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach your Child to Read and Write - From Baby to Age 7. New York: Da Cappo Press, 2010.

5 Lise Eliot, What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

6 Shayne B. Piasta, Laura M. Justice, Anita S. McGinty, & Joan N. Kaderavek, (2012). Increasing young children's contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810–820.

7 Shayne B. Piasta, Laura M. Justice, Anita S. McGinty, & Joan N. Kaderavek, (2012). Increasing young children's contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810–820.

More References:

Eliot, Lise. (1999). What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. New York: Bantam Books.

Gentry, J. Richard. (2010). Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach your Child to Read and Write—From Baby to Age 7. New York: Da Cappo Press.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades." Journal of Educational Psychology, 80 (4) 443–47.

Kuhl, Patricia. (2010) cracking the speech code: Language and the infant brain" Pinkel Lecture, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. April 16, 2010. For the full lecture go to http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/pinkel/lectures/kuhl/index.shtml.

Kuhl, Patrcia & Rivera-Gaxiola, Maritza. (2008). Neural substrates of language acquisition," Annual Review of Neurosciscience.31:511–34.

Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., & Kaderavek, J. N. (2012). Increasing young children's contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810–820.

Watch Dr. Gentry's Video Endorsement