Dear Families,
Learning to Read in the Block Area and on the Playground
Reading is one of the most common topics parents ask early childhood teachers about, and frequently their primary questions revolve around when we will teach children to read. For parents this, understandably, seems like a straightforward question, because for many of us our own recollections of learning to read feel quite binary, as if a switch flipped in our childhood between the time before we were able to read and the time after. Reading does, after all, change the way in which we relate to the world. A code that was mysterious to us is revealed, and with this revelation comes new independence as well as a vast breadth of information and experience that was previously inaccessible and is suddenly ours. There is indeed something fundamentally different about life before and after becoming a reader. Reading is often described as the “gateway” to all other learning, as if we are stepping across a threshold into a distinctly new life, and certainly it does grant us access and power that is critical to our lifelong learning, to the opportunities we will have, and to the way in which we participate in our culture.
Image from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
However, the binary vision of learning to read that lives in these metaphors of transformation and fuels the question of “when” undercuts the most important feature of reading, which is understanding. In teacher speak this is the difference between fluency and comprehension. Fluency primarily involves learning to decode words with increasing speed and accuracy. There is a great deal of variation in the age and pace at which children learn to translate the abstract symbols of grouped letters into words and sentences. For some children this comes suddenly and quickly; it does indeed feel transformative when they “break the code” and words swiftly begin to come to life. For other children, it takes more time and requires more direct instruction, practice, and nurturing to make sense of the jumble of lines and curves on a page. Even when decoding appears to be miraculously spontaneous, there are still many precursors. As children are exposed to books and to letters they build experience with the conventions and consistency of printed material, and as they learn to rhyme, to distinguish between sounds, to recognize shapes, and to translate other more basic symbols, such as the red octagon of a stop sign, into a word or directive, they are paving the way for later decoding. Reading may, for some children, appear to develop overnight, but even in these cases it is, in fact, a skill that rests upon a mountain of other skills.
Comprehension, on the other hand, requires a much deeper well of experience and continues to develop and deepen across our entire lifetime. It is the fundamental purpose of learning to read, and yet it is often the side of reading we think about the least, presuming that understanding will flow naturally from decoding—as though once we have unlocked the ability to transform symbols into words, knowledge will readily follow.
But the dynamic between experience and understanding is much more complex. We certainly gain new insight from reading. We also bring our prior understandings to our reading, gleaning as much from the text as our own experience allows us to access. Think, for example, of books you may have read and then re-read later in life. Sometimes this experience brings a comfortable familiarity, but often it reveals gaps in our initial comprehension, and we are able to understand more deeply as we return to the text with increasingly complex knowledge of people and of the world. Coming back to a text with a new range of life experience to draw upon gives us a greater capacity for insight.
We see evidence of this in the drop in reading scores that often occurs in the middle school years. Certainly some of this is due to the many other challenges of middle school life. But it does appear that there is some correlation between the resources children bring to their understanding of increasingly complex characters and stories and their objectively measured skill as readers. Reading gives us a glimpse of the experiences of others and allows us to practice understanding people, stories, and information that may be novel to us. But our capacity to do this at all—to step into someone else’s experience or way of understanding—is a skill-set in and of itself, and one that begins on the playground, well before we have learned to decode words.
Longstanding research has shown that there is a clear relationship between play in early childhood and literacy development later on in school. An aspect of this relationship appears to have to do with the way in which young children begin to experiment with the use of symbols in their imaginative play, before they ever learn to read. But a relationship between learning to empathize and take perspectives, as children play with puppets, create characters for one another, and negotiate their own differences, is also coming to be understood as a fundamental precursor to story recollection and comprehension in later literacy. We begin learning to “read” people from our first days in the world, and each experience that enhances and adds nuance to this ability supports our access to complex characters and narratives. As children negotiate a difference of opinion in the block area, enact a familiar story with their stuffed animals, or weave superhero narratives on the playground, they are learning to read. For, as educator Vivian Gussin Paley reminds us, children know that, “a person is a story.”
Shabbat shalom,
Alicia