Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader : Part 2

What Your First Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First-Grade Education
by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

(Page 2 of 2)

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. For that, children need repeated practice in working with letters and sounds in order to develop a good initial understanding of how language works. This does not mean mindless drill; rather, it means providing repeated and varied opportunities for children to work and play with letters and sounds.

There are many ways for a school to put together a good first-grade program in reading and writing, and many good materials for schools to use. Whatever the local approach or materials, any good first-grade program will do much of the following:

A good first-grade program helps children develop their oral language, including speaking and listening. Children continue to hear good literature, both fiction and nonfiction, read aloud, often with the written text displayed so they can "follow along." They are asked to talk about books that have been read to them, to ask and answer questions, and sometimes to retell or summarize the story.

A good first-grade program continues the practice begun in kindergarten of explicitly and systematically developing children's phonemic awareness, that is, the understanding that the sounds of a word can be thought of as a string of smaller, individual sounds. Children participate in a variety of listening and speaking activities designed to help them recognize and compare sounds that make up words. For example, they may be asked to listen to a word, such as "take," then to "say it again but start with mmm" ("make"); "say it again but start with rrr" ("rake"). Or they may be asked which word has the short a sound as in "apple": "mat" or "mate"? Which word has the long o sound as in "hope": "mop" or "mope"?

In first grade, in addition to developing phonemic awareness through listening and speaking activities, children should consistently practice associating specific sounds with particular written letters and combinations of letters. They should be given regular opportunities to "sound out," read, and write words that correspond to the letter-sound patterns they have been taught. Parents take note: Some schools discourage children from sounding out words and urge them instead to "guess" the words based on "clues" from pictures or what's going on in the story. This is a serious mistake. Children need to learn a systematic, reliable way to figure out words they don't know, and this can come only from giving them explicit instruction in the code of our written language. It is important that this instruction be systematically organized to make explicit the letter-sound patterns and present them in a way that builds logically and sequentially, not in a haphazard or occasional fashion. Phonics instruction is most effective when it is regular, if not daily, with one skill building on another and with plenty of practice and review.

As children master individual letter-sound patterns and become able to sound out words, a good program provides phonetically controlled reading materials. These are simple stories written in a controlled vocabulary that corresponds to the letter-sound patterns that a child has been taught in preparation for reading the story. For example, after being taught how a silent "e" at the end of a word can make a vowel long, a child might read a story about how "Jake made a cake." While such stories are of course not great literature, they are very helpful in teaching children to read, especially in providing the early and tremendously satisfying experience of being able "to read it all by myself." In preparation for reading these stories, children also need to add to their stock of sight words, such as "of," "was," "do," "the."

Once children have demonstrated some success with phonetically controlled reading materials, they should be introduced to and asked to read, with occasional assistance, stories that are not phonetically controlled but are written for beginning readers, such as Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books or Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia books. (See below, pages 13-14, for more titles of books for beginning readers.)

A good first-grade program provides regular handwriting practice through which children refine letter size and legibility, and learn to make appropriate use of the space on a page to present written information. (See charts, pages 8 and 9.)

A good program introduces a few conventions and rules of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. (You can reinforce some basic rules by reading aloud the information in the box on page 10, and by gently reminding your child of these rules when she writes.)

A good first-grade program provides a classroom environment in which children are surrounded by written language that is meaningful to them, such as posters with the children's names and birthdays, name labels on desks or storage cubbies, and word labels on objects in the classroom ("door," "blackboard," "map," etc.). A good program recognizes that reading and writing reinforce each other, and it provides children with many opportunities to practice writing. Learning to read may be coordinated with learning to spell and write through regular dictation exercises in which the teacher calls out words that the children have practiced reading and asks the children to spell them (that is, correctly write the words, or sometimes short sentences, on paper). Other writing is more for purposes of communication or creativity, such as writing letters, descriptions, short stories, poems, captions to pictures, and the like. First graders will often want to say more than they can write correctly, so in some cases the children should be encouraged to use phonetic spelling, that is, "to spell it the way they think it sounds" (so that a child may write, for example, "bot" for "boat"). This occasional practice of phonetic spelling is beneficial for first graders because it engages them in actively thinking about the sounds of words and how they are represented, and can make them more interested in writing and more willing to put their thoughts on paper. Of course, children need regular practice with conventional, correct spellings as well.

That, in brief, describes some of what a good first-grade program will do to help children achieve the goal of becoming independent readers and writers. Some children will surpass this goal; others may come close but not quite achieve it. But every child should receive appropriate instruction, materials, and support, and should be guided and encouraged to do his or her best to meet the goal. If a child is having difficulty, a school should not rationalize his difficulty by saying that the child is "not developmentally ready." You do not wait for readiness to happen. Rather, the child who is less ready should be given even more support, encouragement, and practice in the areas posing difficulty.

What about the children who surpass the goals for first grade? Children who surpass the goals should of course not be held back. There will always be, as proud parents are delighted to report, a few first graders, and even kindergartners, who are "reading everything they can get their hands on," even books like Charlotte's Web and Little House on the Prairie. These few children who are reading dramatically beyond grade level should be encouraged, and their appetite for books should be fed with appropriately challenging material. At the same time, they can still benefit from explicit, systematic instruction in letter-sound correspondences.

Copyright © 1999 by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

About the Author

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of The Schools We Need, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and the bestselling Cultural Literacy. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.