ReadWorks

She was reading. Could I just get her a library card, and let her educate herself? 

In June she was still unsure about words that end in y, and about double effs and double esses and double ells. In November, so far, I'm still not raising a bookworm. I once in a while catch her reading the side of a cereal box, or one of her old board books. But I'm glad we kept on doing reading lessons.

If it was complicated, she couldn't read it. Not in June. But if most of the words were familiar, and the sentences were short, and there was lots of repetition, she would bring all her concentration to it. At least for one page of big print. She might read it from start to finish, or she might stop after every sentence and react. Talking to her is not the same: she zones out or interrupts or tries to change the subject. Our conversations are fun but they are not didactic. Reading lesson was a new channel of communication between us.

What should I send down this channel? Most of the world's written knowledge is news to a five-year-old. When I was counting the days until I ran out of the "100 easy lessons", I found this idea on a website called ReadWorks:

Article-A-Day is a 10-15 minute routine designed to be done every day to build background knowledge, vocabulary, and reading stamina. Article-A-Day complements a broad range of curricula and is recommended for kindergarteners to eighth-graders. ... The Article-A-Day sets are grouped topically or to systematically build vocabulary. Find sets that gradually become more challenging as the school year progresses and are coordinated by topics across grade levels.

They don't cost money but you have to make an account to see their articles. I was disappointed when I did. What they have that is pitched at kindergarteners is meant to be read aloud by a teacher. The kids fill out a worksheet after. "If the students cannot write yet, they can draw their responses." For a new reader it wasn't great for practice, and I wasn't excited about the content.

But I liked the idea of a little bit of nonfiction every day. After one false start it wasn't hard to write 100 words about a subject that was new to her, in words she could handle. I made it easier to write that much the next day, and every day, by having a big part of each passage recapitulate yesterday's passage.

I wanted to write about history but she knew very little about calendar dates, or even about numbers. The day after "Cats and dogs," I didn't make her read anything but this:

five, zero, ten, one, two, hundred, thousand

Each of those in large handwriting, an arrow drawn underneath, and a box to the side for her to print numerals. It was a worksheet. She already knew in speech the words "hundred" and "thousand," but only now in November is she maybe starting to know their magnitude. "Five" and "zero" were established favorites for her. The irregular spellings of one and two drew out a nice conversation. "A thousand years ago I think they actually said it t'whoah but we don't say it like that anymore."

Here's the lesson from the day after that: 

Spain, Genoa, India, Bahamas, America, ght, caught, light, bought, hundred, tried, year, years, month, people, explore, explorer, exploring, think, thought, heard 

A new way to get to India

Five hundred years ago, the king and queen of Spain paid an explorer to find a new way to get to India. That explorer was from Genoa and his name was Columbus. The king and queen thought that he was good at exploring.

The old way to get to India was by land, but Columbus looked for a new way to get there. He tried to get there in a ship. Two other ships went with him.

After one month, their ship found land. There were many people living on that land. He thought that he had found India and that those people were Indians. But that land was not India. It was the Bahamas.

The Bahamas are close to America. Until then, the king and queen of Spain had never heard of America. No one in Spain or Genoa had heard of America.

and the day after that:

Columbus, Ferdinand, Isabella, Spain, India, Aragon, Castile, first, paid, country, marry, married, merge, merged, treat, treated, people, prince, princess, remember

The first king and queen of Spain

Remember the king and queen who paid Columbus to find a new way to get to India? Their names were Ferdinand and Isabella. They were the first king and queen of Spain. Before they got married, there was no country called Spain.

Ferdinand was the prince of a country called Aragon. Isabella was the princess of a country called Castile. They were born almost six hundred years ago. They got married and then later they merged Aragon and Castile into one country. That country was called Spain.

Ferdinand and Isabella were a prince and a princess once, but they were not heroes in a story. They treated some of the people in Spain badly. Sometimes you get that from kings and queens!

If I had read them aloud to her she wouldn't have listened. She engaged with them when I made her read them aloud to me. If part of the reading went over her head, I sometimes would expand on that part the next day—it didn't have to be important to me, it just kept away writer's block.

For one session a couple of weeks later, I had too little time or maybe I did have writer's block. I didn't have something new ready for her so I had her read "The first king and queen of Spain" again. It took her almost 40 minutes the first time and only 10 minutes the second time.

Lesson 103

Once it gets going the showcase of each lesson in "Teach your child to read" is little story and a little cartoon. You cover up the cartoon and reveal it to the kid after she finishes reading the story. "What do you think you will see in the picture?" and the kid makes a good guess. It's fun.

Before reading the story, tutor and child go through enumerated "tasks." A little bit of something new and a lot of review from previous lessons.

What kind of tasks? There is a giant h to one side of the script, with an arrow underneath it. "Here's a new sound. We always have to say this sound fast. My turn to say it fast." Then you run your finger along the arrow as you say a pure aspirate "h," careful not to say "huh" or "hah".

Or, there is the word said off to one side, the same size as the h. A little ball is printed under the s, a, and i, and a little tick mark under the d. "Sound it out," and the child says "sssaaaiiid." Her "aaa" and "iii" are separate sounds, she doesn't say "sed." "Very good. That's how we sound out the word. Now listen to me say the word: sed."

The distinction between saying a word and sounding out a word, and many other careful distinctions and explications like it, kept her over 100 lessons from ever getting confused.

The long task in each lesson was to practice reading a list of words, some of them new to her, that would appear in the story. For "lots of cars" it was

farm, are, cars, lots, of, has, old, his, sheep

She had to go through the list twice. The first time through to sound out and then say the word—after she read "haaasss" I had to reply "Good. What word?" and she would either remember "haz" or I would tell her.  The second time through to say the words the fast way. It takes a while. When she flagged, or complained, it was usually during this part. The story at the end was dessert, it took concentration but she was happy reading it.

For lesson 101 I gave her a short kids' book, by Crosby Bonsall. The epilogue had recommended it along with a list of words to "preteach": bigger, dead, does, fault, it's, mine, she's, smart, yours. I told her the lessons from now on would be different, and showed her the sheet with the practice words on it: my big handwriting and a hand drawn arrow under each word. When she was through with them I revealed the new book. I might have succeeded to make it seem like a prize. She was proud to be able to read it to herself, and later that day to her grandparents.

The next day I wrote something, about snakes. I made it way too hard, like an encyclopedia article and not like a prize. For the lesson after I thought I should scale it way back:

igh, night, right, light, fight, sigh, day, strange, stranger, saliva, hurt, people

Cats and Dogs

Some people like cats and some people like dogs. Some people might not like cats or dogs.

Some people might like dogs at night and cats in the daytime. Some people like both cats and dogs, all of the time.

Cats and dogs might bite you if you are a stranger. Their saliva does not have any venom but their bite can still hurt!

That was all it took for her to learn to read "people" and words with "igh."

Zig

She would have learned to read anyway. Her 100 lessons took 100 days. There are 180 days in a school-year, if you don't count the weekends. Maybe she would have made the same progress if we had spent the time another way.

My own experience of learning, in childhood and now, is of sometimes feeling ahead of where I was 100 days ago but never feeling ahead of where I was yesterday. Taking a class or reading a book is confusing. It is hard to follow along but I can hope that I will have gotten something useful out of it in retrospect. 

"Teach your child to read" showed me a different model. The glass filled up with water. It felt like I was holding the pitcher. I wasn't scientific about it, I was just impressed. Who made this curriculum?

Siegfried Engelmann died in 2019. He has a website that was updated at least as recently as 2012. "Teach your child to read" was published in 1983. He might have been on the Merv Griffin show in 1966, promoting one of two books he wrote that year. Before that, he was in advertising. He was born in 1931.

It looks like a lot of that long career, maybe everything after 1966, he spent developing a curriculum called "Direct Instruction" and pitching it to public schools and to politicians. That's a battlefield. Zig has critics.

Lots of his writing online is addressed to those critics, and I don't understand it. "Teach your child to read" is crystal clear and it seemed to work, but it was not easy to find out what else you can do this way with a five-year-old. There are other "Direct Instruction" products but they are expensive, not available by interlibrary loan, and probably can't be used like "Teach your child to read." They are for classrooms.

But there are two videos on his website, one from 1963 of his twin four-year-old boys, one from 1966 with seven children who had not yet started first grade, who might have been in a preschool he ran with Carl Bereiter. They are showing off what math they can do. The twins in 1963 are a little ahead of the class in 1966, who were way ahead of Maria in 2020. 

The twins methodically work out the sum of 355 and 297, solve for R given D = 9R and D = 36, add fractions like 2/7+33/7 and 2/2+20/4, find one of the sides of a rectangle given its area and another side, and more. They take turns with the problems and only make one mistake, in between reels.

The kids in 1966 had memorized a little more of the times tables than the twins had. The twins will study the problem for a moment, say something like "count by nines how many times to get to 36?" and then consult a big sheet of paper behind them with a handwritten multiplication table on it to find out. They think out loud about each problem, and it sounds like they really know what is going on as they work.

In June my daughter was a full year older than these boys and didn't know that 8+1=9. If Zig Engelmann had written a book called "Teach your child math in 100 lessons," I would like to find it. Here is a hint from elsewhere on his website:

Jerry Silbert had been urging me to put Give Your Child a Superior Mind online. I didn’t want to do that because a large part of the book provides instructional sequences for reading and math. We have better ways to teach these subjects now than we did back in 1966, so I resisted Jerry’s suggestion. Finally, he urged me to put the first part of the book online. After quite a few urgings, I decided that I should at least read the first part, which I hadn’t done since 1966. I read it, and I was very impressed. I didn’t think that what I wrote back then would hold up so well.

I don't mind the boasting, he might have earned it. That title bothers me but maybe it wouldn't have in 1966. The book is long out of print. The part that Zig put online doesn't have any math in it, and I still haven't found out what "better ways to teach these subjects" he is talking about. I ordered a used copy for 60 bucks. It came in July, it looks just like a crummy paperback self-help book. Maria is almost through it.