White House
Address by Grover
J. (Russ) Whitehurst
Assistant Secretary
of Education for Research and Improvement
Good day. I am very pleased to be able to talk with you about
cognitive development in the preschool period. I am very appreciative of the
First Lady's and the President's commitment to this issue.
My task is to provide a brief introduction to the science that
relates to this topic and that undergirds many of the presentations you will
hear at this conference. I was asked to do this before I became Assistant
Secretary, and will be speaking in the guise of a researcher who has worked on
this general topic for 31 years. This is my last gasp in that role. If I have
to sing a swan song, I guess this isn't a bad setting in which to do it.
One of my early mentors told me that in giving a speech I should
tell the audience what I'm going to say, say it, and then tell them what I
said. I'll follow that advice today.
I'm going to focus on pre-reading skills that children acquire in
the preschool period, and how these skills, or the absence of them, affect a
child's later ability to learn to read. In introducing this topic, I'm going to
tell you why learning to read is important and why this task is difficult for
children. Then I'll describe important pre-reading abilities. Next I'll
describe the influence of economic poverty on the development of pre-reading
abilities. Then I'll describe some research that demonstrates the predictive
power of pre-reading abilities for later reading outcomes. And finally, I will
describe three interventions that enhance pre-reading skills, each targeted for
a different time span during the preschool period.
Why is reading
important?
Millions of adults in the
Beyond these economic and social factors, people who cannot read
or cannot read well are unable to experience the joys of learning, the
opportunities for self-reflection, or the simple pleasures of being lost in a
book. As that great philosopher, Groucho Marx, put it:
"Outside of a dog, a book is Man's best friend.
And inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
We will hear a lot about early cognitive development and
pre-reading skills at this gathering. As we think about these topics, let's
keep in mind that reading difficulties are not abstractions. They are very
real, intensely frustrating experiences in the daily lives of hundreds of
thousands of children who struggle to learn to read.
What can we do to prepare children to learn to read so that they
will not experience these frustrations?
What's so hard about
learning to read?
We need to understand that reading is not natural. Writing was
invented only about 5000 years ago, and the phenomenon of mass literacy is so
recent that it occurred in the last tick of the clock of human history. Given a
normal brain and somebody else to converse with, humans will develop a
language. It is natural.
One reason that reading isn't easy is that it is based on a code
called the alphabetic principle. That code maps minimal units of written
language, in the case of English these are letters of the alphabet, onto
minimal units of spoken language, called phonemes. You know what alphabet
letters are. What word would we have if we took the /b/ sound away from bat? That /b/
sound is a phoneme.
To take you back to those days before you knew how to read and
give some sense of the difficulty of the alphabetic principle, consider the
following example of print:
This is a pre-roman Celtic writing called Ogham. Very strange looking, isn't it.
Now listen to this:
How does this writing map onto those sounds? How are these marks
to be divided up into units? And, how is that stream of sound to be divided up
into units? What are the phonemes, if you will? Once the writing and the sounds
are parsed into individual pieces, the graphemes and phonemes, how do they link
up? Which unit of writing corresponds to which unit of sound?
Very mysterious, isn't it? What you need to realize is that the
connections between the English alphabet and the sounds of spoken English are
just as mysterious for a young child.
Not only is the code not transparent, but in English we throw
children the curve of what is called "deep orthography." Our language
has a commitment to spelling the roots of words the same, even when the
pronunciation changes. Thus, say this word:
CHILD
Now say this word:
CHILDREN
Why isn't it CHILD-REN instead of CHILL-DREN?
To make it harder for children to break the code, I guess.
Now add to the arbitrary code, and irregular spellings, a
considerable demand on phonological memory. I recently looked at a videotape of
a little second grade girl, Jennifer, laboriously trying to read an 8-page
picture book. It took her over 31 minutes, with her mother's help. By the time
Jennifer got to the end of a sentence in which she'd flubbed and stumbled over
most of the words, to the point at which she could potentially comprehend what
she'd read, a minute or two may have passed, and she wasn't able to remember
what she sounded out at the beginning of the sentence. Some children have a lot
more trouble remembering sounds than others, and these children are
particularly prone to reading problems. We actually have brain imaging results
on children that demonstrate the location of these difficulties.
Notice that the pre-reading area is found just above the storage
area for germ finding, and next to the wiggling center.
More seriously, we do have clear neurological evidence from real
imaging studies that some poor readers have problems in the left temporal lobe
of the brain.
To the mix of an arbitrary code, irregular spellings, and demands
on phonological memory, let's add a fourth element of difficulty -
instructional confusion. This is a polite euphemism for the teacher not knowing
what she's doing. Far too few teachers in elementary schools in this country,
much less preschools, have received any training in how children learn to read
and how to teach them. So, struggling children may not only
not get the help they need, but in many cases they may be misdirected by
their teacher. For example, we know that children need to break the alphabetic
code in order to be able to read, yet many teachers still ask children who are
struggling with a word to guess what it might be from context. They believe
that good readers often guess at words. Yet, we know that good readers read
nearly every word on the page. It is struggling readers who guess.
To sum up, learning to read is hard for at least 4 reasons:
arbitrary code, irregular code, demands on phonological memory, and
instructional confusion. For these reasons, many children don't learn to read
well, with dire consequences. Is there anything we can do to help?
The answer, of course, is yes. The roots of reading difficulties
lie in the preschool period, and that is where prevention must begin.
Pre-reading skills, a
classification system
The pre-reading domain includes the skills, knowledge, and
attitudes that are precursors to children's ability to read and write, and the
environments that support those abilities. Thirty years ago, people interested
in this topic would have called it reading readiness and would have focused on
those skills that children need to be taught in kindergarten, such as names of
letters of the alphabet. Today, we know that the precursors to literacy start
at a much earlier age than kindergarten. Thus we approach literacy as a
developmental continuum that starts early in life and merges into conventional
reading and writing. Learning the names of letters of the alphabet is still
important, very important, but it is but one step in a process that begins much
earlier in a child's life.
As illustrated in this figure, children's attitudes about print,
for example, whether they enjoy being read to, and their pre-reading skills,
for example, whether they have good vocabularies and know something about how
print works, affect their later reading. And both their skills and their
attitudes are affected by their environment -- for example, being read to
frequently by a loving parent.
A few years ago, I and my colleague Christopher Lonigan proposed a
broad division of pre-reading and conventional literacy into two interrelated
domains: outside-in and inside-out. This distinction proved useful to many
people as a way of thinking about pre-reading, and it has subsequently been
validated by research.
The outside-in domain represents children's understanding of
information outside of the particular printed words they are trying to read. It
depends on knowing the meanings of words, having conceptual knowledge of the
subject of the written text, and understanding the print that has come before
the word being read. The inside-out units represent children's knowledge of the
rules for translating the particular writing they are trying to read into
spoken words.
Imagine a child trying to read the sentence, "She sent off to
the very best seed house for five bushels of lupine seed," from the award
winning children's picture book, Miss
Rumphius. Being able to say the sentence from the print on the page depends
on knowing letters, sounds, and links between letters and sounds. These are
inside-out processes, which is to say that they are based on and keyed to the
elements of the sentence itself. However, a child could have the requisite inside-out
skills to read the sentence aloud and still not read it successfully. What does
the sentence mean?
Comprehension of all but the simplest of writing depends on
knowledge that cannot be found in the word or sentence itself. Who is the
"she" referred to in the sentence above? Why is she sending away for
seed? Why does she need five bushels? What is lupine? In short what is the
narrative, conceptual, and semantic context in which this sentence is found,
and how does the sentence make sense within that context? Answering these
questions depends on outside-in processes, which is to say that the child must
bring to bear knowledge of the world, semantic knowledge, and knowledge of the
written context in which this particular sentence occurred.
A child who cannot translate a sequence of graphemes into sounds
cannot understand a written sentence, but neither can a child who does not
understand anything about the concepts referred to in the sentence and the
context in which the sentence occurs. Outside-in and inside-out processes are
both essential to reading, and work simultaneously in readers who are reading
well.
Let's unpack both the outside-in and inside-out domains into some
of the component skills that we know to be important precursors of learning to
read.
Outside-in domain
Narrative and story
structure
Children who have listened to adults tell stories, have been read
pictures books, and have overheard and participated in oral descriptions of
events come to understand the general script for that type of language use. In
a typical picture book story, for example, characters are introduced, e.g., a
bus, a bus driver, and children. Next some goal or motive is set up, e.g., the
children are going to school. Next, something happens to the characters, e.g.,
the bus breaks down. Finally, there is a resolution to the problem, e.g., the
children help the driver fix the bus and everyone gets to school on time.
Children learn these scripts, sometimes called story grammars, and it helps
them remember a story the next time they hear one or read one.
Conceptual and
semantic knowledge
Children who know something about the world are much better able
to understand what they read once they get to the age of formal instruction in
reading. Development of language, vocabulary, conceptual knowledge, and domain
knowledge is a life-long process. It begins early in life and needs to continue
throughout the preschool period, and beyond. By first grade, linguistically
advantaged children are likely to have vocabularies that are four times the
size of their linguistically disadvantaged peers. These differences widen over
the elementary school years, and result in children who have great difficulty
in understanding what they are reading, who cannot write well-formed coherent
compositions, and who have trouble in oral expression. How is a second grader
who defines the word "shock" as a "big fish" or
"jail" as "that stuff you put in your hair" going to make
sense of written stories that include these words?
Inside-out domain
Phonological
sensitivity
Phonological sensitivity refers to the ability to detect and
manipulate the sound structure of oral language. Phonological sensitivity might
be revealed by a such things as child's ability to identify words that rhyme
("What rhymes with cat?"), or to delete words from compound words to
form a new word ("What word would we have if we took 'cow' away from
'cowboy'?). It is very important to understand that phonological sensitivity is
an oral language skill that can develop without any exposure to print or
letters. It is NOT phonics, which is a teaching method that emphasizes the
relationship between letters and corresponding sounds. Thus phonological
sensitivity is something that can and should develop in the preschool period.
Phonological sensitivity promotes the development of reading
skills because letters in written language correspond to speech sounds at the
level of phonemes. If children cannot perceive the individual sounds in spoken
words, they will have difficulty identifying the correspondence between print
and the language it represents.
Here is a question that four-year-olds will answer correctly if
they are developing phonological awareness at an appropriate level for their
age:
This is a zebra, a shoe, a wall, and a leaf. Point
to the one that rhymes with ball.
Print knowledge
Print knowledge refers to a child's developing understand of the
writing system. It progresses from very simple understanding of things like how
to hold a book, to understanding that print in English runs from top to bottom
and left to right across a page, to functions of written language such as what
a menu is for, to the ability to name letters of the alphabet. Knowledge of
print is half the equation of the writing code. Children need to know how print
works if they are going to be able to link units of sound to units of print.
Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds would be able
to answer correctly if they were developing print knowledge at an
age-appropriate level:
Find the picture that has a word in it.
Emergent writing
Another route to print awareness and letter knowledge is through
writing. Emergent writing includes pretending to write and learning to write
one's name. Similar to phonological awareness and print knowledge, it too goes
through a developmental progression over the preschool years for children who
are raised in literate homes. At the earliest stage young children learn to
hold and use crayons and other writing instruments to draw. Later they will
begin to write letters.
Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds with
age-appropriate levels of emergent writing would be able to answer:
Some children wrote their name. Find the one that is written the
best.
Poverty and
pre-reading skills
By one estimate, 35% of children in the
Children from low-income families are substantially behind their
more affluent peers in both the outside-in and inside-out components of
pre-reading. For instance, the typical child in some urban public schools
enters kindergarten at the 5th percentile in vocabulary knowledge, and does not
know words such as chicken, leaf, and triangle.
Children raised in poverty are also substantially behind on
inside-out skills such as letter naming and phonological awareness. For
instance, the typical child enters Head Start as a four-year-old being able to
name no more than a single letter of the alphabet. How many letters do you
think this typical child can name on exit from preschool a year later? One. By
way of comparison, a typical middle-class child would be able to name all the
letters on entry into kindergarten. Is this important? Reading scores in 10th
grade can be predicted with surprising accuracy from knowledge of the alphabet
in kindergarten.
Pre-reading
experiences and poverty
Not surprisingly, the delays and gaps in pre-reading skills
evidenced by preschoolers from low-income backgrounds are mirrored in their
exposure to experiences that might support the development of pre-reading
skills. Numerous studies have documented differences between low-income and
other children in availability of children's books, frequency of shared book
reading, and the quality of language interactions between children and parents.
These are all experiences that have strong effects on outside-in skills. I am
reminded of some of the remarkable findings of the ground-breaking Meaningful
Differences study by Hart and Risley, mentioned earlier by Mrs. Bush. Over a
2.5 year period, these investigators recorded naturally occurring conversations
in the homes of professional, working class, and welfare families with young
children. There was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between
professional and welfare parents. The professional families' children at age 3
actually had a larger recorded vocabulary than the welfare families' parents. I
will say that again. The 3-year-olds from the affluent families had larger
spoken vocabularies than the parents from the welfare families. Children who
aren't talked to, who aren't engaged in rich language interactions with their
parents, are going to have low levels of vocabulary and conceptual development,
and this will affect their later reading and academic achievement.
These differences extend to experiences that could support
development of inside-out skills. For instance, Jana Mason found that there
were no alphabet materials available for preschoolers in the homes of about
half of the welfare families she studied. These materials were found in the
homes of nearly all children of professional parents. We know that a child does
not learn the name of the letter A or what sound it makes or how to print it
through osmosis. Children learn these things because adults encourage them to
do so.
Children who don't have the environmental supports for learning
outside-in and inside-out skills fall way behind those that do. Preschoolers
from low-income homes are particularly likely to be bereft of these supporting
experiences, but the problem is not confined to a single social strata, and
many low-income parents do an excellent job in this area.
We need to be very concerned about children who enter school way
behind their peers on pre-reading skills because the relation between the
skills with which children enter school and their later academic performance is
strikingly stable. For instance, the probability that a child will remain a
poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if he or she is a poor reader at the
end of the first grade is .88.
The prediction of
reading skills from pre-reading skills
My colleagues at Stony Brook have recently completed a multi-year
longitudinal study aimed in part at determining how reading skills in
elementary school were determined by preschool cognitive abilities. We followed
the literacy outcomes of children attending Head Start, the federal preschool
program for children in poverty. The study involved about 600 children who were
first encountered as they entered Head Start as four-year-olds. We followed
these children annually through the end of elementary school. Each year we
assessed the children on a large number of measures of pre-reading, and later,
literacy skills.
We used a fancy statistical technique called structural equation
modeling to understand the data we collected. I won't bore you with the details
of it here, but it is a powerful way of examining causal influences in
development.
The most important finding from our study was that inside-out
skills in the pre-K and kindergarten period such as letter knowledge and
phonological sensitivity were much stronger influences on reading achievement
in Grades 1 and 2 than were outside-in abilities such as vocabulary. Conceptual
and vocabulary skills come to be important in later elementary grades once
children have cracked the alphabetic code and are reading for understanding,
but early on its inside-out pre-reading skills that determine reading outcomes.
One way to illustrate this statistically is that we could predict which kids in
our sample would be poor readers in 2nd grade with above 80% accuracy from
their inside-out skills at exit from Head Start.
What does this mean? It means that children need to develop
phonological sensitivity, need to know their letters, how to write their names,
and how print works before they start school. Children who have acquired these
inside-out skills are going to have many fewer reading problems in elementary
school than children who do not have these abilities.
It is important to note that the ability of this model to predict
outcomes for these children, who are all from low-income families, means that
there are very substantial differences among these children and their families.
Some do well. Some don't. The positive message is that having a low family
income does not in and of itself mean that children will have low levels of
pre-reading ability, or low levels of language interaction, or poor reading
outcomes. None of the experiences that are important in developing reading
abilities are exclusive to the middle class. They occur in many low-income families,
and should occur more frequently in a lot of families across the socio-economic
spectrum.
A Developmental
Continuum of Pre-reading Goals
To sum up my points so far: Reading is important. Learning to read
is difficult for many children. Reading outcomes in elementary school for
low-income children can be predicted strongly from their pre-reading abilities.
It follows that we should consider ways to enhance children's pre-reading
skills. In doing so, it will be important to consider the vast developmental
differences that exist among children of different ages within the preschool
period. The needs of a toddler are quite different from those of a
four-year-old, and thus successful programs and interventions will have to
differ for different ages and stages of growth and development.
Here is a preliminary breakdown of the appropriate goals or
targets for intervention at different ages.
Infants and toddlers:
Emotional bonding
Pleasure in book interactions
Sound of parents' voice
Two- and three-year-olds
Vocabulary and concepts
Book knowledge
Narrative understanding
Four- and five-year-olds
Print knowledge
Phonological sensitivity
Letter-sound correspondence
Emergent writing
The arrows on the figure mean that the goals of one developmental
period don't cease when the next developmental task begins. Thus positive
emotional experiences around books, which should begin for infants and
toddlers, shouldn't stop when children reach two or three years of age and need
to start learning acquiring vocabulary and concepts.
Example programs
In the subsequent presentations at this conference you will hear
about several programs that have been shown to enhance children's pre-reading
skills. Let me briefly describe three programs I've been involved in that
illustrate the developmental goals I've outlined.
Bonding with Baby
intervention
Focusing on the youngest preschoolers, my colleagues and I have
recently completed an evaluation of a program to enhance the frequency of
shared book reading in low-income parents, and in particular the pleasure
associated with shared book reading. We know from a variety of research that
the earlier the better when it comes to parent-child shared book reading, and
that establishing a positive emotional bond around shared reading can provide a
lifetime of motivation for children to read.
The program was for infants from 6 to 12 months of age. The
intervention was very simple, consisting of a 15-minute video that extolled the
virtues of sharing books and a series of picture books designed to be
attractive to infants. We sent the materials through the mail to 50 families in
the intervention condition. Another 50 families, randomly assigned, did not
receive the materials. All families completed daily logs of the frequency and
pleasure of a variety of infant activities such as bathing, feeding, shared
play, and reading books with infant.
Here you see some of the differences between families in the two
conditions. Mothers in the intervention condition reported spending much more
time in shared book reading with their infants than mothers in the control
group.
They reported that they enjoyed shared book reading more than
mothers in the comparison condition.
They reported that their baby enjoyed shared book reading more
than mothers in the comparison condition.
Dialogic reading
intervention
Focusing on two- and three-year-olds, my colleagues and I have
been working for 15 years on a technique of sharing picture books with children
called dialogic reading. The intent of dialogic reading is to use book sharing
as an opportunity to enhance children's vocabulary and cognitive growth. This
is a very important developmental goal for two- and three-year-olds.
The essence of dialogic reading is a shift in roles. Instead of
the adult being the person who tells the story while the child listens, the
child becomes the person who talks about the book, with the adult asking
questions, expanding the child's answers, and in general serving as an audience
and conversational partner for the child.
We help parents and teachers learn how to engage in dialogic
reading through brief tutorial videos. The videos model how adults can ask
questions. An example of an open-ended question, one of the question types we
teach parents, is "What's going on this page?" OR "I read the
last page. Now it's your turn; you tell me about this page."
Dialogic reading is one of the best-validated interventions in the
whole arena of preschool cognitive development. It has been used with gifted
children, with children who have disabilities, with children from low-income
families, with children in homes, in preschools, and all over the United States
and other countries.
It also works with Spanish speaking children, as well as those
from English speaking homes. Here are some results from a study we did a number
of years ago in Mexico. Two- and three-year-old children in the intervention
condition got a couple of weeks of daily sessions of dialogic reading in their
daycare center. Children in the control condition, randomly assigned, received
an equal amount of one-on-one time in toy play with an adult. The posttest
results for expressive language, e.g., being shown a ball and asked to describe
it, showed an 11-month language advantage for children in the intervention
group. Remember that this was a result of only a few weeks of interactive
reading.
Classroom activities
and dynamic assessment intervention
Focusing now on the oldest preschoolers, four- and five-year-olds,
my colleagues and I have been working on an intervention to develop inside-out
skills for four-year-olds in the pre-K year. This does not mean that the
emotional bonding outcomes that are targets for infants, or the vocabulary and
conceptual skills that are targets for two- and three-year-olds cease to be
important. Children should continue to have experiences that affect these
outcomes. At the same time they need to begin to learn about print, and
letters, and sounds.
We recently completed a year-long intervention in Head Start
centers that involved introducing 20 simple classroom exercises that focused on
inside-out skills and asking teachers to keep track of how individual children
in the class were doing in mastering the skills that were the focus of each exercise.
For instance, a rhyming exercise had children sit in a circle. The
teacher said a word, such as zip, then rolled the ball to a child in the
circle. That child's task was to say a word that rhymed with zip (dip) then
roll the ball to another child, who produced another rhyming word (lip). The
teacher would note on a record form each child's success in accomplishing this
task.
Classrooms were randomly assigned to engage in the intervention or
to continue with the regular Head Start curriculum. At the end of the year, we
assessed children on a variety of inside-out pre-reading skills.
Here are the results for one of those skills, rhyming. In general,
we saw large and significant differences between the intervention and control
classrooms in children's acquisition of pre-reading skills. The intervention
program was not particularly intrusive and did not require extensive training
and support of teachers. The local Head Start agency was enthusiastic and has
asked to extend the program to all of their classrooms this next year.
Summary and Policy
Recommendations
I told you what I was going to tell you. I told it. Now let me
tell you what I told you and what I think it means for policy.
Reading is the keystone for academic and life success. Learning to
read is difficult for many children. Children who fall behind in reading early
in elementary school are unlikely to catch up. Children from low-income
backgrounds are particularly at risk of early reading difficulties. Children
know a lot about reading before they begin formal reading instruction, and this
pre-reading knowledge provides the building blocks for learning to read and
write. As is the case for reading itself, children from low-income homes often
are disadvantaged in terms of their pre-reading abilities.
The developmental precursors of reading are already organized into
outside-in and inside-out domains during the preschool period. The strong,
direct correlates of reading success in early elementary school are inside-out
skills from the kindergarten and pre-k periods.
Given the strong predictive relationship between pre-reading
skills and later reading outcomes, screening children for pre-reading knowledge
should become as routine as screening for problems in hearing and vision.
Efforts to prevent reading problems need to be sensitive to
developmental differences over the preschool period. Interventions to enhance
emotional experiences around books should begin early in life. Older children
who are talking can be engaged in interactive book reading experiences that
enhance their vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. By the time children are
four years of age, the pre-K programs they attend should provide instruction in
the inside-out skill components of pre-reading such as letters, sounds, print
principles, and emergent writing.
Acknowledging the value of pre-academic content in preschools does
not mean that should be the only goal of preschool education. Both
social-emotional competences such as the ability to interact well with peers
and general approaches toward learning such as task persistence are important
to later school success, over and above the effects of specific pre-academic
skills. However, social-emotional skills and approaches to learning have to be
acquired in the context of more cognitive activities. Arguably, a child can
acquire the ability to share and persist as well while learning about letters
as while working with Playdoe. Or, as we will see in a later presentation
today, children can learn about sharing while making letters from Playdoe.
Acknowledging the value of pre-academic content in preschools also
does not mean that four-year-olds should be taught using the same methods and
materials as a employed for seven-year-olds. A push-down to pre-K of the
pedagogy and materials used in elementary school will likely fail and could
actually harm young children. The challenge for preschool education is to
develop classroom activities that teach while engaging and developing
children's interests -- activities that are both fun and educational.
Preschoolers are demonstrably eager to learn about all manner of topics,
including reading, math, and science, so a little ingenuity, time, and money
ought to accomplish this task.
An effort to provide more academic content in preschools will
likely generate disappointment among policy makers and taxpayers unless it is
accompanied by educational policies that link preschool curricula with pedagogy
and content in kindergarten and elementary school. Preschool needs to get
children ready for school, not just in a generic sense, but ready for something
specific that will be provided at the next educational step and then built on
thereafter. We would expect any run-of-the-mill piano teacher to start students
with the basics and move them through a sequence of lessons that are
hierarchically organized and cumulative in their effects. Shouldn't we expect
as much of the connections between the lessons of preschool and school?
Teachers will need new teaching materials and curricula that are
based on the science of reading and pre-reading. Where those materials already
exist, they need to be disseminated. Teachers will need training in how to
incorporate instruction in cognitive skills to preschoolers in ways that engage
children's interest and encourage their motivation to learn.
On the home front, we need to let parents, grandparents, and other
adults who are involved with young children know how very important it is for
children to interact with print, to be talked to, and to play with speech
sounds. Getting the word out need not be expensive. It could be a flyer on the
door, or a billboard, or, as we will hear later today, a program at the
library. If most parents knew the importance of these activities, and how to do
them, they would do their part.
Finally, although we know that pre-reading skills are strong
predictors of later reading outcomes, weaknesses in pre-reading are not a
reason to quit on any child. If children aren't ready for what the school has
to offer, then the school will have to change to meet those children's needs.
We cannot leave children mired in calamity of reading failure simply because
their families or preschools did not do their job in getting them ready for
school. Let's do what we can to enhance children's readiness. What we can do is
a lot, but let's also insist that schools develop and deploy remedial programs
that will bring up those children who start behind.
Knowledge of the importance of pre-reading skills and ways to
enhance those skills for all children is important for every adult, not just
parents or preschool teachers.
Let's remember the story of pig and hen. As they walked down the
street together they passed a charity box. Hen said, "I'll give some eggs
if you'll give a ham." Pig said, "For you that would be a gift. For
me that would be a commitment." We need to be pig, not hen.
Let's make a commitment to do what we can to see that all children
have the preschool experiences they need when they get on that school bus for
first grade.
^^ top ^^
Last Updated, August 1,
2001 (pjk)