Been seeing a lot of posts going around talking about the way kids are being taught to read these days and, as a mother to a 1st grader, I have some thoughts.
It should go without saying that the best way to ensure your kid can read, and not just read, but comprehend and be able to apply critical thought to what they’ve read, is to build a strong foundation at home before they ever even set foot in a classroom. Don’t rely on overworked and underpaid teachers to give your child the specific attention they need; that is your job. It is your job to regularly read to your child and be seen reading by them to normalize reading and instill a love for it in them. If you make reading a burden and a chore, it will always seem like a burden and a chore to them. If you struggle with reading for any reason, there are countless videos online of people reading kids books. Watch Sesame Street with them, stream old Reading Rainbows, ask a friend or family member to set up reading dates with your child, take them to the library for story hour; there are any number of ways to ensure your child gets read to and sees others reading during their formative years.
And more than just reading to them, TALK TO THEM about what you read. Go over things, discuss your feelings about what you just read even if it’s just The Giving Tree (we have LOTS of differing thoughts on the giving tree in this household), you would be surprised and delighted at what your child takes from a book. Give them the gift of not just reading, but of COMPREHENSION. The thing that scares me is you have all these kids guessing at what words they’re reading and guessing at their meaning. How can you really comprehend a text if you don’t know what half the words are? I used to have a friend who spelled just….atrociously. But he wrote sentences well enough that you could extrapolate what he meant most of the time. Now you have kids who can’t spell and they’re reading and writing incomprehensible sentences. What’s going to happen in high school when they’re given a book to read and analyze? How are they going to understand the actual messages being told? It’s not a real albatross, it’s metaphorical, but most of the kids won’t be able to even read the word albatross or they won’t know what one is and they won’t understand metaphors, so you’ll have some freshman teacher trying to teach something that requires multiple elements of knowledge, none of which these kids have.
Even when you watch movies with your kid, talk about them afterwards. Discuss the characters and their motives, talk about why certain characters chose certain things and what you may have done differently. We would read Roald Dahl books with our kid and then watch the movie adaptation and compare the two. We do that with any kids book we find that has a movie adaptation, and he delights in recognizing things from the books in the movie, seeing where things are different, why they might have made that directorial choice, why that character was left out or melded into one. Take any chance you can to help your kid exercise their brain; it helps make learning easier. Let them make decisions, let them be involved, encourage them to be active participants in life and your family. All of this will make it so that they’re more eager to learn, more driven to succeed, and better able to adapt. So much of education is this many layered, multi-pronged approach and you can’t really neglect any aspect of it too much.
You can’t just send your kid to school with no support at home and then blame the teachers who are teaching 24 kids alongside your one. You can’t just never read and always be on your phone and expect your kid to love reading. You can’t ignore your kid and their opinions and expect them to form good opinions. You can’t make all the decisions for your kid and then expect them to develop critical thinking skills. You can’t ignore all these aspects and then act surprised when you have an adult child who can’t read and if they can they don’t know what it means and if they do know what it means they can’t critically analyze it and develop an opinion on it and they just repeat buzzwords from stuff that they recognize, call it an “informed opinion” and go on making the world a worse place to be.
Read to your kids. Read with them. Read in front of them. Talk to your kids. Ask their opinion. Compare and contrast things. Build their brains up so that they crave knowledge and not just empty stimulation.