Lois Letchford shares strategies for teaching vulnerable children to read: use poetry to spark curiosity, give words a "nest" by teaching them in context, balance decoding with broader language understanding, and increase enjoyment and laughter. She references Mary Atkinson's "Hear It, See It, Say It, Do It, Read It, Write It" books.
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Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and literacy problem solver, talking about the secret ingredients to reading success of pain to purpose. Once we've reached a crossroads of pain, it allows us to find a purpose. I've talked about the poetry. I've talked about tapping into a child's curiosity and their imagination. And when we do that, tap into these things through poetry in particular, we give words a bed. A nest is my preference. And that nest means words don't come in isolation. They come wrapped, tied with other words. They come wrapped, tied in a context. And they come wrapped in knowledge. We're not just teaching children to decode. We're teaching them how language works, why it works the way it does, and why it is important, not to them, not to someone else, why it's important to you. And that is the critical— to me, the critical secret ingredient. Why am I doing this? And I'm not doing it because you've told me. I'm doing it because I want to. Because I'm laughing. Because this is exciting. And that was transformative for my child. Who was making minuscule growth, or appeared to be making minuscule growth in teaching of decoding. I taught him to decode using the books Hear It, See It, Say It, Do It, Read It, Write It by Mary Atkinson. I've talked about them before. Doing those for Nicholas was fantastic. If that's all I had done, I would have failed him because decoding is one component of a complex problem that's required to teach children to read. And by focusing solely on decoding, we ignore all the other components that are involved in learning to read. The first thing we said, we cannot have stress. A stressed brain is a fight or flight brain. So we need an environment that is relaxed, where the child is confident and their brain is allowed to work. That's number 1, decrease the stress. 2, increase in laughter and enjoyment because then the brain is ready to take information in. So that's number 2. Number 3, give words a nest. Allow them to sit not only as an individual word, but a word in context with other words and show children how the written language works. Thank you. I'm Lois Letchford. Hit like, hit subscribe, and join me as we take on our most vulnerable children and make them successful in reading.
