Lesson 100, lesson 101, and lesson 250

In each lesson of "Teach your child to read" the tutor reads a script, printed in small pink letters. The child reads phonemes, words, sentences, and eventually stories, printed in large black letters. The print shrinks gradually from lesson 1 to lesson 100, never to the adult size. It switches suddenly from the Distar font at lesson 74. 

At lesson 53, the stories start to have titles. Here it is without the Distar:

lots of cars

a man on a farm has lots of cars. he has old cars. he has little cars.

are his cars for goats? no. 

are his cars for sheep? no. 

are his cars for cows? no.

his cars are for cops. he has lots of cop cars.

Upper case is introduced close to the end. Here's the story in lesson 100:

Hunting for Tigers—Part 2.

An old man was shooting at a tiger.

The tiger sat down and started to sing. The old man shot. This shot hit a rock. A bug was in back of that rock. "Stop making this rock jump," the bug shouted.

But the old man did not stop shooting. The man shot a hole in the sand. An ant said, "Thank you, that is a good ant hole."

The tiger kept singing and the man kept shooting. Then the man stopped. He said, "I am out of shots. So I must stop hunting."

The tiger came over and licked the old man on the nose. The old man said, "You can not do that. Tigers do not lick. They bite."

The tiger said, "Not this tiger. I am a tame tiger." Then the tiger said "I love to lick noses and I love to sing."

The old man said, "I must get out of here, but I can not see. So I can not find my house." 

The tiger said, "I will take you home if you give me a good coat."

So now the tiger has a tiger coat and a coat from the old man. And the old man has no coats.

This Is the Last Ending.

I was anticipating this last lesson throughout the second half of the book. I loved and Maria accepted spending 30 minutes a day like this. It's likely it was good for her. The school was (and remains) closed. So what should we do for lessons 101-200?

The story in lesson 100 fills a page of the book, so maybe she could read a page out of a children's book every day. The epilogue to "Teach your child to read" suggests something like this:

It might seem that if your child has mastered the first steps in decoding, the child should easily be able to read other material that is ostensibly designed for beginning reading, such as the easy-to-read books that are advertised in stores and on TV. The problem is that your child probably reads at the second-grade level (if the child has completed the program successfully). Most of these books are written for the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade level. Most of them contain an outrageous vocabulary. The best of them are good listening books, but not very good reading books for the neophyte reader.

However, of the incredibly large group of children's books that is available, there are a handful that can be presented with some preteaching to a child who reads at the second-grade level. Below is a list of twenty books that you can introduce. 

That was written in 1983, I don't know if the landscape of children's books or the meaning of "3rd grade level" has changed since then. But I ordered some off of their list a few weeks before we finished the book. I was ready to go with "Mine's the Best" by Crosby Bonsall for lesson 101. But it was clear when I got it that it would be good for only one session: it is 30 pages long but with only 3 or 4 words on each page. "Nate the Great" was good for three sessions. Keeping it up every day took more thinking. 

This blog is for keeping track of that thinking. I started writing them myself. Here's a lesson from last week, I haven't been counting but let's call it lesson 250:

Bricks, wood, and stone

In Sumer there was always plenty of mud. The people living in Ancient Mesopotamia learned how to make bricks out of the mud. But those bricks did not last for very long. Archaeologists think that they might have started to crumble after just fifty years. So fifty centuries later, they can't find many Sumerian buildings.

Do you think that Gilgamesh and Enkidu would have liked to live in a building made out of cedar wood, instead of mud brick? But even cedar wood cannot last for fifty centuries. Bricks and wood won't last for fifty centuries. Will any buildings last for fifty centuries?

Stone buildings can last for a hundred centuries! Long before Sumer, long before Uruk was built in Lower Mesopotamia, there were people making big stone buildings. Somebody made a big stone temple in Upper Mesopotamia. Do you remember what we call that temple now?

Who built Gobekli Tepe? We don't know much about them. They didn't have writing.

The Ancient Egyptians did have writing. They had hieroglyphic writing. And they buried their pharaohs in big stone buildings called pyramids. When the pharaoh died, they wrapped him in linen, and they put his mummy into a golden coffin, and they put that coffin into a big pyramid.

And do you know what? We know the name of the man who built the first pyramid. His name was Imhotep.

That's supposed to be nonfiction. Corrections welcome.

Discipline

My kid gets along with me. She is not a brat or a terror. Usually, I have more fun with her than I have by myself. Sometimes, I appreciate a break.

She accepts my authority about when to come inside, when to turn off the computer, when to turn out the lights. But she also employs charisma and whining to get out of following the rules. I usually have trouble getting and keeping her attention.

Lesson 1 of 100 was very easy for both of us. The book provides a script for the tutor to read. That is a characteristic of Engelmann products—except for his early ones, more on that later. Listen to me say 'sss' as I run my finger under the letter. Now you do it. Listen to me say 'sssaaammm' as I run my finger under the letters. Now you do it. Now I'll say it fast, 'sam.' Now you say it fast.

It doesn't require any preparation and it's over in twenty minutes.

Lessons 5, 6, and 7 (or so) were harder. She got bored and wanted to stop. I got through it without threats or bribes. Past a certain length of time, lying down on the floor is more boring than reading lesson. I'm more patient than a five-year-old, I was able to win the battle of wills a few times in a row.

Then we had a streak of many easy-going lessons. She got a little bit better every day, and I sometimes picked up a small insight about reading, or learning, or teaching. For the tutor, some lessons are more fun than others. But if those small insights went over my head some days, overall I picked up something big about the role of repetition in learning.

Einstein was impressed by compound interest, a "powerful force in the universe." But even accretion is a powerful force. At lesson 40 the kid is not a bad reader, not of children's books.

(Well, a footnote about that. At the beginning the kid is being trained to read in a weird font, called Distar. There are visual cues that tell if a letter is silent, or if a vowel is long or short. There are some children's books printed in the same font; sadly "My Pet Goat" is a very famous example. The readings are printed normally from lesson 75 or so, and the kid adjusts quickly.)

Besides building a skill, we had built a habit of doing a lesson every day. At lesson 40, I thought I would miss it after we got through the book.

Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons

A friend of mine went to college at 10 or something, and graduated as a teenager. He says he learned to read at two. Would it be exciting to raise a prodigy?

"Maria" learned the ABC song before she was two. Pretty early, I don't remember when, she could write her name. I looked around in a cursory way for how small kids learn to read, and found out about the plausible "Montessori method." They recommend not to call the letters by their names but by their sounds. You don't say "see ay tee" to spell cat. You say "cuh ah tuh." 

There are props, the "Montessori sandpaper letters." I bought some version of them, and told her that mom was spelled muh-oh-muh.

This way Maria learned some sounds for the letters. I had hoped that she would learn to read by being read to, which I did often. But she never agreed to try to sound out a word on her own. If I did get her to sound out cuh-ah-tuh, the sounds did not remind her of the word cat. She didn't learn to read at two, or at four.

Early in 2020 another friend recommended "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." The cover says by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox and Elaine Bruner. More on Engelmann later. We finished it in May and now it might be my favorite book in any subject, anyway I can't stop thinking about it.

This passage from the introduction dispelled a lot confusion

The simplest procedure is to start with a word that ends in the sound you are interested in. Say the word slowly and loudly, as you would say it to a person who is hard of hearing. For example, to figure out how to say the sound nnn in isolation, say the word fan very slowly, holding each sound for at least one second. The way you say the nnn sound in that word is the way you would say  the sound nnn in isolation. Note that you do not say "fffaaannnuh" or "fffaaannnih." So when you say the nnn sound in isolation, you would not say "nnnuh" or "nnnih." You would say a pure nnn with no additional sound tacked onto the end.

To figure out how to say the t sound, say the word fat slowly and loudly. Note that you cannot hold the t sound. It occurs quickly no matter how long you hold the fff sound and the aaa sound (both of which can be held a long time). Note also that you do not add a funny sound to the ned. You do not say "fffaaatuh" or "fffaaatih." So you would not say "tuh" or "tih" when you present the t sound in isolation.

I already knew how to sound out "fan" and "fat," but my daughter didn't. I wasn't able to explain it to her before.

 

 

prologue

The coronavirus closed the schools at the beginning of my daughter’s formal education. For eight months I’ve been tutoring her at home: how to read, how to do arithmetic, what was a dinosaur. It takes a couple of hours every day, less at the beginning. After we finish she watches TV or plays outside.

But I don’t stop thinking about it or reacting to it all day. I have spent some time as a college “teacher” but this is a different experience for me. It’s sent me to sift through a gigantic and tendentious literature about education.

I might keep a record in this space of what I’ve been doing.