What Your First Grader Needs to Know : Fundamentals of a Good First-Grade Education

Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader

PARENTS: Before we present a selection of poems and stories for your child, we want to address you directly. This section, Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader, is intended to help you understand how children are--or should be--taught to read and write in a good first-grade classroom, and to suggest a few ways that you can help at home. The first section below, Teaching Children to Read: The Need for a Balanced Approach, summarizes a discussion presented in What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know. If you have already read this, then you may wish to skip ahead to page 5 and begin with the section Goals for Reading and Writing: From Kindergarten to First Grade.

Teaching Children to Read: The Need for a Balanced Approach

Everyone agrees that children should learn to read. But not everyone agrees how to achieve that goal. Many studies have demonstrated, however, that while fashions come and go in education, pulling schools toward one extreme or another, there is a reasonable middle ground that is best for children.

This middle ground balances two approaches that some educators mistakenly see as mutually exclusive. The first approach emphasizes the systematic teaching of the "nuts and bolts" of written language: phonics and decoding skills (turning written letters into spoken sounds), spelling, handwriting, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraph form, and other rules and conventions. The second approach emphasizes the need for children to be nourished on a rich diet of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It focuses attention on the meanings and messages conveyed by written words, and insists that children be given frequent opportunities to use language in creative and expressive ways.

Schools need to embrace both of these approaches. In particular, at the time of this writing, many elementary schools need to pay much more attention to the "nuts and bolts": they need to take steps to balance a worthwhile emphasis on literature and creative expression with an equally necessary emphasis on the basic how-to skills of reading and writing.

Learning to Read and Write

To learn to read is to learn to understand and use our language, specifically our written language. Learning to read is not like learning to speak. While speech seems to come naturally, reading is a very different story. It is not enough just to see or hear others reading. Learning to read takes effort and instruction, because reading is not a natural process. Our written language is not a natural thing--it is an artificial code. There is no natural reason why when you see this mark--A--you should hear in your mind a sound that rhymes with "day." But you do, because you have learned the code. A few children seem to figure out this code for themselves, but most children need organized, systematic, direct instruction in how to decode the words on the page, that is, to turn the written symbols, the letters, into the speech sounds they represent.

The key to helping children unlock the code of our written language is to help them understand the relationships between individual letters, and combinations of letters, and the sounds they make. True, sometimes these relationships seem odd: consider, for example, the different sounds of the letters "ough" in "though" and "enough." Despite these occasional oddities, there is a logic to the written English alphabet: its basic symbols, the letters, represent the basic speech sounds, or phonemes, of our spoken language. The relationships between letters and sounds exhibit many regular patterns, as in, for example, "cat," "hat," "sat," "mat," "fat," "rat."

So, part of learning to read means learning the predictable letter-sound patterns in written words. Learning these letter-sound patterns enables a child who confronts a page of print to decode the written words into the sounds of spoken language they represent. The other side of the coin here is learning the basic skills of writing, which enable a child who faces a blank page to encode the sounds of spoken language by putting on paper the corresponding written letters to form words, and by following other conventions of writing (such as capitalization and punctuation) that allow us to get across our meanings, even when the person to whom we are communicating is not present before us.

All this talk about decoding and encoding may sound very mechanical and a little intimidating. It should be kept in mind that instruction in decoding and encoding is all in the service of meaning and understanding. If children are to communicate their ideas, thoughts, and desires in writing, as well as to understand what others are saying in print--whether it's a traffic sign, a movie poster, a letter from a relative, or a story by Dr. Seuss or Beverly Cleary--then they need to have the tools to encode and decode written English.

Goals for Reading and Writing: From Kindergarten to First Grade

In What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, we stated that a reasonable goal for instruction in kindergarten is to have all children beginning to read and write on their own by the end of the kindergarten year. By this we meant that kindergartners should:

become comfortably familiar with the letters of the alphabet so that they can readily recognize and name the letters.

develop a deliberate and conscious awareness of some of the sounds of oral language, and begin to make explicit connections between spoken sounds and printed letters.

print both uppercase and lowercase letters with some proficiency, and write using some phonetic spelling (that is, spelling based on what they have learned so far about how words sound, for example, "bot" for "boat").

be comfortable reading simple words they can sound out, as well as a few common "sight words," words that occur very often in writing but do not conform to the usual letter-sound patterns, such as "the," "an," "of," etc.

A reasonable goal for first grade is for children to become independent readers and writers--which, of course, doesn't mean that they ought to be able to read any book in the library or write a polished, perfectly spelled essay. By the end of the year, however, it is reasonable to expect that, with only limited assistance, first graders will read books appropriate to beginning readers and express themselves comfortably and legibly in writing.

What Does a Good First-Grade Program Do?

A good first-grade program can help children become independent readers and writers by taking a balanced approach that emphasizes both meaning and decoding. In a good first-grade class, children will be provided many opportunities to communicate and express themselves in speech and writing. As the year advances, they will be presented with appropriate "beginner books" and other print materials to read, with some assistance as needed, but with the goal of reading independently. They will continue to listen to interesting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and will be asked to talk about them and respond to them in thoughtful ways. Such literature gives children insight into a world of meaning expressed in words that they may not be able to read entirely on their own, but that they understand when the words are read aloud and discussed with an adult.

But for children to learn to read, it's not enough just to have good books read aloud to them. Listening to books does help children acquire a sense of what makes up a story, and motivates them to want to read. But it will not teach them how to read the words on the page....