POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2020 BY TRACEYHAYLES@OPTUSNET.COM.AU

I know as parents we are told over and over, “read your child three books a day,” and bingo when they get to school they will be ready to learn to read. Sounds easy doesn’t it. 

Take it from someone who has two children that found it hard to read and now specializes in teaching dyslexics to read it is just not that easy. 

So what is reading? 

Reading is a code. Yes, that’s right it is a code. A human invention that we created approximately 6000 years. And here’s the icing on the cake, as human beings we don’t come pre-wired to learn to read. That’s right, we don’t have one single bit of neural circuity that is placed in our brain that is the magic pathway that helps us learn to read. 

So let’s look at how the brain actually learns to read. 

First up as humans we are preprogrammed to learn to speak. The brain has neural circuitry deep inside it that when activated it helps us to learn to communicate and talk. This is important to know as it plays a part in learning to read, in fact when learning to read we utilize some of this circuitry to build our reading circuitry.  

All up though learning to read involves building neural circuitry from scratch. Now are you starting to see why learning to read is hard. 

This is what the brain does to learn to read. 

First up it has to develop phonological and phonemic awareness. This is our ability to manipulate the sounds in words. Phonological and phonemic awareness skills incorporate identifying rhyming words, identifying syllables, identifying sounds in words, hearing sounds and being able to make them into a word. 

At its highest level it is about being able to take sounds out of a word and make a new word such as say stale take /t/ out and what do we get – sail. 

Once a child has started to progress along the phonemic awareness road we then start to develop knowledge of the code of our language. 

We need to learn the sound each letter makes and that we can put the sounds together  to make a word. This would be simple if each word in our language was there letters, two consonants and a vowel but as we all know that is not the case. 

Once we have mastered the single alphabet sounds we need to learn diagraphs and trigraphs, two or three letters making a new sound. Are you know thinking this learning to read gig isn’t as easy as you thought? I hope so, because there is more, as in English we also have irregular words. We need to learn syllabification and how to rapidly decode to develop fluency, then there is comprehension, oh and let’s not forget encoding, yes spelling. My point is learning to read is one of the hardest cognitive tasks that the brain performs. Let’s stop assuming it is easy, learn about the science of reading and start helping our children learn to read. Follow us on Facebook to learn more about how you can help your child to learn to read using the science of reading.