(gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by United Way of South Central Michigan.

Engaging with community partners to address the social issues related to financial instability.

More at unitedforscmi.org.

(bright music) - Reading is a human invention.

It is not a natural biological process.

- Okay, you ready to read?

- Uh huh.

- We have to teach our brains how to read and create new neural pathways.

- The brain has to adapt.

Reading takes time and effort to develop.

- The first five years of life are so important to long-term success in literacy development.

- Reading is one of the most complex things that we do as human beings.

But once you're taught how to read in a way that makes sense to you, you'll be a reader.

(bright music) (gentle music) - Reading is a powerful force.

- Look at all the tools that the doctor is using.

- Once children learn to read, they can teach themselves about anything that they want to learn about.

- I saw a lot of animals.

Look at all these animals.

- Learn about the world.

- Let's put our finger on the first word and let's read the first sentence together.

- Learn how to do new things.

- Look it, he took all the branches, he's gonna go build a house.

- Figure out how things work.

- Looks like it's giving you more information about police officers.

- And to gain new knowledge about things that are beyond your daily life.

- Being able to read is just essential to success.

It's important to your work.

It's important to being a citizen in order to read the ballot.

It's important for health to be able to know how to take your prescriptions.

Driving involves reading.

Learning to read is an incredibly complex cognitive task and literacy, reading and writing really sits on a basis of language.

(gentle music) (bright music) - We are pre-wired and our body is designed to speak.

- [Teacher] You know what that is?

- Robot.

- [Teacher] It's a robot.

- Children have an incredible ability to learn language.

Any language, you can place them anywhere and they will acquire the language natively.

Writing and reading, these are skills that you have to learn.

- The title of the book, that's how we know what the book is.

- Evolution has indulged us with the circuitry for spoken language.

Here is the model of the brain.

The speech centers are on the left dominant side.

The Wernicke's Area is responsible for understanding and comprehension of speech.

You also have the Broca's Area which is in the frontal lobe.

It's responsible for speech fluency and there's a communication between these two structures which is called Arcuate Fasciculus.

Whether you speak Hebrew, Tswana like in my language which has different disciplines of grammar, disciplines of linguistics, they all go to the same area.

- The first five years of life are so important to long-term success in literacy development.

Part of that is that the birth to five years are the years in which human beings are most quickly developing language.

(student mimicking pig) - You're saying, "oink, oink, oink, oink" - Vocabularies developing then, syntax, your ability to sort of understand the order of words and how that order signifies meaning.

- "Hi Champ, let's check out your height.

That's how tall you are."

- When we acquire language, you listen before you speak.

Talking to them, singing to them, that's huge.

- "Stay well until your next visit."

- When they're very young, the child makes a noise.

Being able to respond to that.

(student speaking) - It's so funny, that's a shoe car.

- The child's a little bit older and they point, say they point at a dog actually saying, "oh yes, you see a dog, look it, that's a brown dog."

- Oh, looks like you're holding onto Mia to balance.

You're lifting up one leg.

I use a lot of self-talk in the classroom.

Which means you're labeling what it is you're doing as you're doing it, so children can see what it is you're doing and they're putting language into context.

Now, open up the book cabinet.

And then reading with the children.

Getting down at their level, having them sit in your lap.

- Did you wanna look at this book?

- Talking to them and encouraging them to point to the pictures.

We ask, "tell me about what you see or what you notice."

I saw green duck.

- Quack, quack, quack.

- Quack, quack, quack, quack.

- What you're doing is you're taking children's early efforts at communicating and you're expanding those efforts and therefore really scaffolding or building them into the next level of sophistication in their language.

That's really, really important for children's development.

- That was the last page of the book.

- Ooh.

(bright music) - Did you spot someone over there?

- Mm hm.

- Reading is a human invention.

It is not a natural biological process.

So we actually can't expect children to just pick this up naturally.

We have to teach our brains how to read and create new neural pathways in the brain.

- We have circuitry for spoken language but for reading, it has to be acquired.

Compared to adults, children's brains have the ability to rearrange according to experience through something called synaptic pruning.

Children have more synapses than adults.

With time, they get pruned out, meaning they fall out.

So if you activate circuitry it won't be pruned out.

If you don't use something, it will get pruned out.

Regarding the reading centers of the brain there are two centers at the back, the Occipital-Temporal where we have the visual word finding area and also the Parietal-Temporal which is responsible for word processing and also the Frontal Lobe the Broca's area which is responsible also for word processing and articulation and they also have the white matter tracks that are able to connect these cortexes together.

And as this communication between different areas they have to work together for speech, language to materialize.

(bright music) - I love the younger age group 'cause we have that unique opportunity to start.

Everything is very new to them and exciting to them.

He's noticing the cat, a lion is a big cat.

There's a variety of focus that we do in the classrooms.

One thing is really the environment and the interactions that we have within those environments.

So maintain that eye contact and really go with their lead.

Ask questions and expand on what they're saying.

- A lion.

- A lion on his shirt.

And it looks like you have an animal on your shirt.

It's a dog.

If they say a one or two word sentence I acknowledge that and then expand on that.

- Dog.

- [Rachel Stark] Luke thinks it's a dog.

- The more high quality language interactions they have the bigger their vocabulary will be and the more attention they'll be able to pay to those sounds and words.

♪ If you're happy and you know it wiggle your hips ♪ - Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.

- Any kind of song, nursery rhymes all of those things that have rhyming, that have rhythm, that have vocabulary.

- Luke, you seem happy, you're clapping your hands.

- They often really love that word play, you know?

They love to take their name and make it silly.

- When I rhyme your name, you may come feel a bird if you'd like.

Smillin, Dylan, Dylan, would you like to feel a bird?

All of that play with words is actually helping them to get that important insight that inside words in our language are individual sounds and those are the sounds that map onto letters.

- Ooh, which one do you want?

- You can't really separate with young children the attachment that they have with the adults in their lives and their literacy development because a lot of the reasons and the ways in which they interact with reading and writing are driven by and contextualized by their relationship with important adults around them.

- I think by reading with my son I can understand my son better and my son would consider me as his reading buddy.

So whenever he got a new book or something the first reaction that he has is like, "mom can you read this book to me?"

And now I see that he's developing that kind of interest in reading the books.

He's learning and that makes reading together very meaningful.

- 'I saw a black cat looking at me.'

- Read, read, read as much as you can but also interact with them around the print.

- Flip it.

There you go.

- Having them flip through the pages, giving them an opportunity to see what a book is.

And then we start to talk to them about book orientation, the way that we should hold a book.

And then as we're reading the words on the page, we follow along with our fingers and we point to the words so that they can start to see how to read from left to right.

- So breaking it down and saying, oh well let's look at the letters.

Where did you start?

To help them understand the letters build to something and they make things.

- Oftentimes people think that children need to learn to read first and then they're going to learn to write.

But in fact, reading and writing are connected throughout development because they draw on the same underlying skills.

- So your author page so we can learn a little bit more about you.

- We want to provide opportunities to build those skills, those fine motor skills.

So we're providing pencils and crayons that they can use to make marks on paper.

- It looks like you're adding a lot of E's.

- And then when they're doing that, we ask them, "Oh I see those marks on your paper.

I'm wondering what it is you're drawing or you're writing.

Okay, I didn't want to interrupt you.

Keep writing."

Elwin, he's starting to really get into writing and that just happened this last week.

So I'm very like excited and passionate.

I was wondering if you could help write another label for the flower.

You have a display and I was gonna put the labels up there and just be like, ah, this is the flower this is the stem, this is the leaf.

But then I was sitting there thinking as I was setting it up, why am I creating the label?

Why am I creating the words?

I'm gonna leave the labels blank.

So that way it invites children to come over like, "oh what are these?

Oh, there's no words there.

Let's write those down."

Elwin was writing maybe not words but to him they were words.

Children may not be writing, they might be in like a scribble stage.

It is still important to highlight their work as well.

It's just as valuable as a child who writes a "W".

We want to make them proud of it as well and put it up along with the other labels.

"Oh no", ELwin asked, "how did the milk get out?"

- When we're writing and we're saying things we want it to be relatable to them and meaningful to them.

So maybe writing their name.

- There's research to suggest that name writing and name reading is sort of a linchpin for children.

It's a launching point for many children.

- Do you know what letter this is?

- D for Dele.

- D for Dele.

- Their own name and their friends' names and everyone that they have in their orbit.

Looking at how those names are spelled and thinking about the letters that make up those names is another thing that's really motivating for young kids.

- Name the letter.

- "O", - Sound it makes.

- (indistinct).

- In the preschool years, we have a really exciting opportunity to begin to help children to really learn the alphabet.

- Name the letter.

- "I".

- Sound it makes.

- "Ih".

- The alphabet in English is the cornerstone of being able to read and to spell words.

Research suggests that we don't need to learn every single letter of the alphabet by the end of preschool but we should have them knowing most of the alphabet.

(children chatter) - In the classroom we want to provide experiences to explore letters and activities that help encourage that letters are more than just what they look like.

♪ A, B, C, D, E, F, G ♪ - The alphabet song is a great place to get started but kids actually need to know lots and lots of things about the alphabet.

Parents and caregivers can support that knowledge by having kids point to letters as you're singing or reciting the alphabet.

- So what letter are you on now?

"I'm on ahhh" - Be explicit with children just to say, you know "this is the letter A and A spells the aa sound" - When we are reading and writing, what we need to access if we're starting from words is the sounds in the word.

If we have a child and we tell them, this word is I-T. Those are the letter names, but what we really need for the child to access are the sounds.

The sounds are I-t.

Put 'em together.

What do we have?

It ,it.

So the sounds are what we need to access.

Now, I'm not saying that we should not teach or have letter names, but it's not the most important thing - Jet.

- There's just so much literacy learning and language learning that's happening in that birth to five period that really provides the basis of the foundation that we build on in the elementary school years and beyond.

- Tuesday.

- Tuesday.

There's Tuesday.

- Four to eight.

That's when the rubber really meets the road for reading.

This is when they're gonna pull on all of those oral language experiences that they've had in the beginning of their childhood and really start to map those onto written language.

- R-ed Red - Orthographic mapping is the process by which children commit written words to memory.

And orthographic mapping happens through matching the sounds that children hear in words to the letters and letter patterns that make up the written word.

- Sound it out.

- E-gg.

Egg.

- Once children have learned to read a word through orthographic mapping, they know that word automatically and it's committed to memory so that they do not have to figure it out each time they come across it.

For example, in the word cat, they need to match the C sound to the letter C and understand that it's C and not K. They have to match the A sound to the letter A and the t sound to the letter T. In order to map that word, they need to go through the process of actually sounding it out verbally - Sound it out.

- M A K. - And that can sound very painful and laborious to adults who are watching children learn to read for the first time.

It's very tempting as adults to kind of jump in and help them guess or tell them to look at the picture or do anything to make that process easier.

But in fact, it's the process that they need to go through in order to learn the word so that they're able to retain that written word in memory and the next time they see it they'll automatically recognize the word.

- Isaiah.

- "I" for Isaiah.

- You're right.

Working with letter sounds is important because it helps them recognize the letters in everyday words that we use in the classroom.

Sometimes children will ask me how to spell a word and I'll tell them the letter and they're like, "no that's not right, that can't be."

And I'm like, yeah, it makes a different sound.

So sometimes we talk about some letters have a different sound when they're put in a different word.

- In English, we borrowed from a bunch of different languages and their spellings.

We have many ways to spell almost every one of our sounds.

Typically there's probably about eight to ten I would say on average like the letter S. We all know, oh, you say S like in sit but it can be sh like in short or it can be zzz like in is.

So the exact same symbol, different sounds that we say.

So this is what makes it a complex code.

- Something that's confusing to a lot of parents is that when they read, they don't have to sound out words.

So they often assume that that's the way their child should learn to read, that they should look at the word and know what it is.

But what we know from research is that adults actually do look at every letter in the word.

Because they've read these words before and have gone through the process of orthographically mapping them, those words are accessible in their memory at first sight but they are not simply looking at the first letter and guessing or guessing based on the context.

They are processing every letter in the word every time which is why we need to teach kids how to do that when they're learning how to read.

- We don't want them memorizing whole words like words on a flashcard by shape or by what they look at because in the English language we have a lot of words that are very similar.

What will happen is they'll be reading along and they'll say "of" for "for" almost all the time.

So we don't want them to think that words are whole units that they just need to memorize.

We want them to go in order by sound.

- Are you ready?

Let me hear you.

- T-A-P. - Wow.

- Kids need lots and lots of opportunities to learn letters and sounds and the letter patterns that make up words.

So we can't just teach kids that A makes the a sound once.

We have to teach them that, give them lots and lots of opportunities to practice it and then lots of opportunities to encounter that in real reading and writing activities.

This one reminds me of O 'cause it's very round - O - Helping your kids say the sounds as they write the letter.

So if we're gonna do "at" write it say ah t, at.

- Once a word is orthographically mapped and retained in a child's memory.

When they see the printed form of the word they automatically recognize the word almost like a reflex which makes reading really fast and easy and paves the way for making reading a fluid enjoyable task for children.

(gentle music) Learning to read is a significant linguistic and cognitive challenge and we ask children to do it basically the minute they arrive at school.

It's not a problem if your child isn't reading at the beginning of kindergarten.

It's not a problem if they need specific instruction and support.

In fact, that's what we would expect for most kids.

- There are many different ways that reading and writing can be going wrong and there are many different things that we need to do to address that.

For some children, it's going to be focusing heavily on improving word reading and spelling.

For other children, that's not the issue.

The issue is actually around comprehension.

It may be around their world knowledge, their vocabulary knowledge, that may be impeding.

So as a country what we need to do is make sure we're providing literacy education that addresses all the different aspects of literacy, and then we need to be able to provide interventions that are differentiated based on where the difficulty is.

- There's a mindset that it has to be all this and none of that or all that and none of this.

And that's not true.

There's nothing in reading that doesn't require flexibility.

- And it was a good idea.

- It's completely normal for different children to need different levels of support to learn to read.

And it's incumbent upon us as educators to figure out what kinds of support and how much support children need to get them to the goal of learning to read.

Do you think you can?

- Yeah.

- Try it out.

- One of the barriers for learning to read for some people is a condition called dyslexia.

And dyslexia has several different symptoms associated with it, but one of them is that it can be very difficult for people with dyslexia to be able to discriminate the individual sounds inside words, which is something that you need in order to be able to spell words and also to be able to decode words.

- So I talked about the two posterior areas, the occipital temporal and the parietal temporal and then the Broca's area.

In normal readers, these areas they activate mostly at the back than in the front.

Studies have shown that in dyslexic kids they tend to activate frontally with instruction and time.

It has shown that they can actually use the opposite lobe to also try to form the visual word form area.

The brain has the plasticity to evolve.

- It's also important to know that dyslexia actually only affects a small percentage of people in the population.

Lots more people have what I call dysteachia, which is really that they're having difficulty learning to read and write because they haven't been provided with high quality research aligned instruction.

To distinguish dyslexia and dysteachia, one of the things you have to look at right away is what has been the educational background of that individual.

Because by definition to diagnose dyslexia, someone has to have tried to teach that person to read and write and found that they're having difficulty doing so.

You can't just take a person who's never gotten any reading and writing instruction and conclude immediately that they're dyslexic.

It's really important to provide a very high quality literacy education for all children, in part because that helps us to know which children are going to need that extra support because they have various characteristics associated with learning to read and write being more difficult.

- One reason that it's so important that schools provide really strong reading instruction is that most children need that instruction to learn to read.

If children don't receive that in school what we see is that parents who have the resources can look into other ways to provide that instruction.

When we rely on those outside services to teach children to read we create a fundamentally inequitable situation where not everyone has access to what they need to succeed in school.

- So to address that, we wanna use every mechanism we can to make sure that there are books and other literacy materials available for all children.

And that includes things like programs where you can sign up to have books sent to children's homes on a regular basis.

Having books not just available in the library but available around the community is one example of ways that we can try to make sure that every child has access to books and other materials that are gonna help to support their literacy development.

- You ready to read the story all together?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- We know that preschool education can help to support language and literacy development, but not all children have access to preschool education.

So we need to make sure that there's high quality preschool education available everywhere, rural and urban and suburban and all different kinds of communities.

Another important inequity that we have a lot of research about has to do with expectations.

Research finds that the expectations we hold for children have a really big impact on their learning and development.

What we see is that teachers often hold lower expectations for children who come from low socioeconomic status or high poverty environments and also lower expectations for children from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

- It's the mindset really of society.

Because you're poor, because your parents are in prison, because whatever that you can't learn to read.

It's so wrong, it's so wrong, just not true, but you think it is.

So guess what?

You're the gatekeeper and you think they can go this far.

Guess how far you're gonna try to teach 'em?

This far?

No, they can go this far.

They can, but they can't unless you believe it.

- The dog can swim.

- Good job reader man.

♪ Four little birds in the one little tree ♪ - I have always loved children.

Would you like me to read this so we can see the information?

I get to use all these skills that I'm really passionate about that I can then use in the classroom and help children grow passionate about too.

So it's really just all about building up them.

- We can really embrace that excitement get them excited about coming to school and really emphasize that love for reading and language.

- I love stories.

I love reading, I love that you get to transport yourself to a different realm of existence.

- I love reading.

I think reading is the way that we create connection between each other.

So a parent like me from a different cultural background can still provide my kid with some sort of connection to our heritage.

That's the power of reading.

- Hello little mouse.

- Reading makes children the captains of their own educational journeys.

They can go wherever they want to go and learn whatever they want to learn.

- He got a a plus.

- There is a Frederick Douglass quote that really sums it up.

"Once you learn to read, you'll be forever free."

And that is just the truth.

(gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by United Way of South Central Michigan, engaging with community partners to address the social issues related to financial instability.

More at Unitedforscmi.org.

(gentle music)