About Kids and Reading

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"Patience." That, says Dr. Paul Palm, director of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Comprehensive Education Center, is one of the most helpful approaches for parents to take when helping their young learners to acquire reading skills. He quickly follows up with two more suggestions: Practice. Persistence.

As director of a regional center that works to help ensure that all students are provided opportunities to meet challenging state content and performance standards, Palm underscores the fundamental need for children to learn to become competent readers when they are in the primary grades.

Palm points to findings from the National Reading Panel that examined more than 100,000 studies in a quest to discover the best research information on teaching young children to read. The work of the panel distilled five critical areas: phonemic awareness phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. "I'm not a reading specialist," Palm said, "and most parents aren't either, but you don't have to be to understand these important keys to learning to be a good reader. Parents like to be clued in where they can, especially when gaining an understanding helps them to help their child.

"It gets down to this: Spoken language is made up of discrete sounds (phonemes) organized into utterances that represent meaning. To communicate on an additional level, we make marks on paper that represent these sounds; we call them letters. We arrange the letters in combinations that make up words—many, many words. And then we arrange the words in a particular order. Someone else can look at our "marks" and "arrangement," and know pretty much what we mean by them, what we're communicating. It's reading.

A child's realization that there is a correspondence between the sounds that we put together in an organized way—talking—and the shapes that we make to represent the sounds—writing—is a crucial relational recognition in learning to read.

"Learning to read takes a lot of effort on the child's part," says Palm, "and effort by teachers and parents as well. It's a very complex process. Very young readers are working on learning 'the code,' that is, the relationship between letters, their combinations, and the related sounds (phonics) that end up as meaning. It's pretty tricky just to get to that point. And then to become an effortless reader who can recognize numerous words (vocabulary), groups of words, and understand the meaning of it all in what seems like a nanosecond, is quite an achievement (fluency and comprehension). Like most worthwhile achievements, it takes practice and persistence, and a generous portion of patience.

"In all the years that I've worked in schools, I'd be hard pressed to name even one parent who didn't desperately want their child to read well so that they can do well academically. It transcends economics and social class. One of the best things that families can do is to demonstrate their respect for reading. Listen to your child read; read to your child; and when they want to read, be ready and very, very willing." Palm says some games to support kids' reading are on Northwest Lab's Web site (www.nwrel.org) and the U.S. Department of Education Web site (www.ed.gov) features Reading First resources.

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.