un-learning how to read

I know a lot of people probably already saw my rant on Facebook, but I'm going to go into greater detail here on my blog.

Last week I was excited to learn that Kevin would be bringing home books that he was supposed to read to me. The first time he brought a book home, I opened the book and thought, "Wow, he can read words like these already?" Then we sat down to read the book. He read it in five seconds, and when I asked him about it, he said that no, he had never read this book before. I had him read it again, and when I watched his face I realized he wasn't even looking at the words. The pictures were so obvious that he didn't need to look at the words at all.

Okay, now let me explain my definition of "reading." To me, reading implies that you can decode the word (for most words, sound it out, or recognize the word if it's a sight word) and comprehend it. You do not need any pictures for this. Does that make sense?

Based on my definition of reading, Kevin was not reading this book. He was guessing based on the pictures.

We went back to read the title, which was not obvious based on the picture on the front cover. He moaned and said he couldn't read it because he didn't know what it said.

Here is an example from a similar book that he brought home yesterday.

When we got to the last page, he said, "The animals." I told him to look at the word and sound it out, and then he realized it said "the farm."

After he read the first book from school, I opened up this book that we had at home and asked him to read it. He looked at the first page and said, "A chicken." It took a little coaxing to get him to sound out the words instead of guessing, but he read the rest of the book and did a great job.

I'm upset because books like these create bad habits in early readers. They get in the habit of guessing what the words are based on the pictures. They also get in the habit of looking at the first couple of letters in a word and guessing what the word is (for example, on the page above that says, "the farm," Kevin would just need to look at the first letter and at the picture and realize the word was "farm"). When I was young and listening to some of my peers struggle with reading, and when I was a teenager and volunteered in the elementary school, I observed that this was a very common problem with kids who struggled with reading. My opinion is that it's unnecessary to start with books like these kindergarteners are reading, and in fact it's doing more harm than good. English may have a lot of exceptions to the rules, but it is still a phonetic language, and if kids are taught English like it's Chinese it's going to take them a long time to learn to read fluently, and they will struggle with reading new words. When I learned to read we started with sounding out words, then we moved on to learning letter combinations (like ow, ea, ar, ai, ful, etc.), learned to use the long vowel sound for most words that end in e, and in the midst of this we also picked up sight words.

I felt resentful that I'm being asked to be an accomplice in teaching my child bad reading habits (especially after all of the work I put into teaching him to read last summer), so I emailed his teacher about it. Apparently the point of these books is to help them develop confidence. Yay for confidence, except where's that confidence going to go if later on they are terrible readers?

The bright side is that at least I know what Kevin is "reading" at school, so now I can work with him on the right way to read at home. We still have quite a bit of the reading book left, and we also have some cute little books called Animal Antics (an example is the book about the hen above). I'll be hunting around to find more.

Up until now I have mostly been very happy with Kevin's school. His handwriting and drawing have improved 300% since he started school, and that by itself is huge to me. I prayed about it again and I still feel like this is where Kevin is supposed to be right now. At this point I don't think this is a deal-breaker, but it's definitely something I will keep my eye on. Everybody raves about how great this elementary school is, so we will see how things pan out. I realize that I'm not trained as an elementary school teacher, but I really don't see any benefit to teaching kids to guess with pictures.