What Children Need to Learn to READ, by Michelle Vallene, is a wonderfully practical guide to teaching literacy skills to young children.  Beginning at birth, it’s full of ideas and information for teaching pre-reading and early reading skills to your little ones.

A lot of the information is sourced from the U.S. Department of Education.  As I’m not terribly impressed with them, it’s no surprise that I have some issues with some of this information.  For instance, there’s a checklist of early literacy skills, by age group.  Overall, this is good information, but it should be taken with a grain of salt, as there is very wide variation among children.  It is perfectly normal for a child to learn to read at age four.  It’s also perfectly normal for a child to learn to read at age eight or nine; it depends on the child.  The U.S. DoE’s checklist sticks with “average,” with no indication of this wide variation in the range of normal.

The book also includes a list of Dolch sight words.  This has the potential to be a helpful tool!  It, too, could use some additional explanation, though, as, in context, it’s rather misleading.  The author calls sight words those which “usually cannot be sounded out” and that are frequently-occurring.  This is in a paragraph immediately preceding the Dolch sight word list.  Many, many of the Dolch words, however, can be sounded out.  In fact, I would venture to guess that more of them can be sounded out than can’t.

The only other “issue” I have with the book is that the view of phonics is rather limited.  Our household uses “vertical phonics” – a form of phonics in which every sound of a given phonogram is taught at once.  (For example, “a” as in “cat,” “cake,” and “father.”)  This is not the norm; the norm is to teach all of the short sounds first, then all of the long sounds, etc.  This produces the “word families” mentioned in the book.  This form of phonics is not wrong!  Many students have learned to read very successfully with this method.  I do wish, though, that more had been included about different phonics methods, so parents don’t think that one way is the only way.

The Good Stuff!

It might sound as if I don’t like the book.  Actually, I think it’s an excellent resource.  There are only a few small details I would like to see addressed and I just described them very thoroughly.  The bulk of the book is comprised of activities for parents to engage in with their children.  It starts with the babies and provides baby/toddler games.  Some of these are “classic” games to play with babies, but you may not have realized that they build pre-reading skills.

The next couple of chapters contain nursery rhymes and songs.  Many of these are action songs or “finger plays.”  Most of them are probably familiar, but it’s helpful to have them all in the same place.  I know I don’t always remember them all — and certainly not when I need them.

The following chapter is about letters of the alphabet.  There are a variety of activities suggested for learning and reinforcing letters, using a variety of learning styles.

After that come the aforementioned sight words, along with a couple of sight word activities.

The next chapter is about read-alouds, listening, and comprehension.  You might think there isn’t much to say here — you just read, right?  But there are tips here for maximizing story time with your children.  There are also some ideas for changing up read-aloud time.

The next three chapters discuss phonics, writing, and word play.

The next four chapters are especially fun.  They’re about games (commercial games that are good for literacy-building), book parties, book clubs for beginning readers, and tongue twisters.

In short, there is a lot here about ways to keep your children engaged in literacy-building activities.  Appendices even provide book recommendations.  If you’re not the musical type, or you’ve forgotten how those childhood songs go, you can pick up a copy of the CD, as well.  (The CD has a phonics song on it, with the primary letter sounds, in addition to the classic children’s songs and nursery rhymes.)

I think this is a useful resource for parents of young children.

Disclosure: The author provided me with a copy of the book above, to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.