018 - How Do Kids Learn to Read? with Teacher Tasha Mendoza, Reading Intervention Specialist

Are you worried about when and how your child will learn to read? Maybe you have a toddler or a three-year-old, and you wonder what you should be doing so your child is ready for reading.

There’s also a lot of pressure about learning to read, especially when people compare one child with another. Maybe in one classroom there may be some kids who are already reading whole words, while others are barely starting to recognize letters of the alphabet. 

We’ll remove the stress and pressure around this, because in this episode, we'll explore the science behind how kids learn to read. 

We've invited Teacher Tasha Reyes-Mendoza, a reading intervention specialist with a master's degree in education as well as special training and 10+ years experience in evidence-based programs to help kids learn to read.

You'll discover answers to questions such as:

• What's the real first step in learning to read? (It's not memorizing the alphabet!)
• Do you really need to wait for readiness? Or can you decide to teach a child to read anytime (like what many on the internet claim)?
• The single biggest reason why parents and kids are stressed about reading, and what to do about it
• and more!

Click here and get your FREE guide: Prepare Your Child for Reading

We have 3 more episodes about helping kids learn to read, also featuring Teacher Tasha Mendoza. Be sure to follow the Discerning Parenting podcast, so you don't miss an episode!

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Transcript

 Are you worried about when and how your child will learn to read? Maybe you have a toddler or a three-year-old and you wonder what you should be doing so your child is ready for reading. There's also a lot of pressure about learning to read, especially when people compare one child with another. Maybe in one classroom, there may be some kids who are already reading Whole Words, while others are barely starting to recognize the letters of the alphabet.

In this episode, we'll remove the stress and pressure around this because we'll explore the science. Behind how kids learn to read, we'll speak with a reading intervention specialist and we'll learn how the science of reading can remove this stress around helping kids learn to read. Are there days you feel you've had it with the sleepless nights, the temper tantrums, and the constant fatigue of trying to keep up with an active baby?

Does it feel like you're always working so hard as a parent trying to do everything for your kids and family, and yet it never feels enough? We get it. You love your child more than anything, and yet parenting is also exhausting and challenging. Especially when you're bombarded with criticism and pressure to be the perfect parent, which spoiler alert does not exist.

That's why we created Discerning Parenting, the podcast that helps you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters in your parenting journey. This podcast is jam-packed with valuable insights and practical tips, specifically tailored for parents of kids age five and below. So join us and discover how you can use the combined power of science, knowing your child, and your own intuition in making the best parenting decisions for you and your family.

Today we're so lucky to have with us, Tasha Mendoza. On top of her Master's in Education with a focus on educational psychology. She's a reading intervention specialist and a Mom of four. This is a series of four episodes all about teaching your child to read. So be sure to follow the Discerning Parenting Podcast so you don't miss any of these episodes.

So welcome teacher Tasha, and it's so nice to have you here. Can you tell us about yourself and your work? What is a reading intervention specialist? Hi, it's so nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me. A reading intervention specialist, which I have been for eight years now, identifies difficulties in students who are struggling in school, and we help them with strategies to overcome any reading and writing delays.

And also we help those who have been diagnosed with, uh, reading disorders. And when we work, we work with them in a clinical setting. So we're always dealing with them one-on-one, which is different from how schools deal with them in groups or big classes. Yeah. So our reading intervention specialist is someone really with special training in teaching specific reading skills and breaking down the different skills that CO that go into teaching reading.

So how do kids learn to read? I know there are so many myths about this and it's stressing parents out. Is reading a matter of memorizing the alphabet and doing worksheets? Yes. I understand how parents can be stressed out. No, because reading actually is a complex skill. There are many skills and skills that go into learning to read.

Exactly. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. We think, okay, learn to read. That's it. But. To learn to read. There are so many little, little steps. Mm-hmm. So I think that many parents instinctively teach their kids to read with worksheets because this is what they see in school. Uh, what teachers do in school is give a worksheet in front of them and then expect them to write ABCs or memorize their ABCs.

And then almost overnight, within a quarter or uh, a semester, Begin to read, right? But I think that there are a lot of things that we have to think about before even putting them down and sitting them down on a table. It's not just memorizing the alphabet. There are a lot of other things to consider, especially if they're very young now.

So between zero and six, so much learning is happening outside. The skill of reading that we have to take into consideration, and I want to introduce the word readiness Now. We teach them to read with formal instruction only when they are ready. If they don't have that readiness, your stress in teaching them will really be apparent.

When I say readiness, it's their readiness to sit down, to learn and understand how these letters work. Readiness for putting into memory the alphabet, the sounds of the alphabet, and versus their name, and there's a certain type of behavior. No, your stress will come if you're teaching someone who does not have the capacity to learn yet.

Yeah, that's such a huge insight, teacher, Tasha. Mm-hmm. Uh, there are two huge insights there. First is that reading is a combination of many different skills because many people think of reading as just one skill. And all these many different skills, there can be a lot for young kids to handle all at one time.

Mm-hmm. And then the second insight there is waiting for readiness. Mm-hmm. It's not just a matter of deciding, okay, today my child is going to learn to read. Mm-hmm. Maybe because of pressure from outside sources. So you decide, okay, we're going to sit down, we're going to do these worksheets. I like to put it into perspective.

No. Before you even begin to teach your child to read. Ask yourself, does he have the capacity for learning to read or learning to absorb with attention? Does he have enough memory capacity for memory, and can he process visually and auditorily? Well, how teacher, Tasha, those are really huge words. That's a lot.

I hear from parents that I'm so stressed because I'm trying to get my child to sit down and I'm trying to teach my child to read and it's not working, or I've been trying to teach my child the alphabet. And then my child just forgets it all the next day. Mm-hmm. And then they're getting frustrated and they feel like they're failing.

Yeah. So that means they need these three basic skills. You said attention, memory, and processing. So what are these things and how do they look for them? Yeah, let me break it down for you now. So for example, when we say memory, imagine if you are learning another language. In another Autographic presentation, or let's say it's not alphanumeric Chinese and you don't know what characters mean or look like, and you're seeing them for the first time, the kids are actually memorizing 26 letters of the alphabet and seeing them and, and putting them to memory for the first time.

26 for a three-year-old, that's a lot. No, they have to memorize how they look, they have to recognize them in an instant. They have to name those letters in both uppercase and lowercase. So that's already 56 symbols, right? Yeah, that's a lot. Uh, on top of that, each letter has a corresponding sound that is different from the name.

So for example, we have letter I that's the name, but says E. Yeah. So you're actually memorizing one, the symbol, how it looks like. Two, the name, what it's called, and then three, what it says. And the name and the sound may be different. Yeah. And that's very confusing. Yeah. This is how confusing it can get.

So like I say, E, okay, so the, the name I says the sound, E, but the letter E, the name E says A. Yeah. So that even just those two letters putting into memory are really confusing. And as an adult, it's hard to learn that even as a second language. Imagine you're three. Four-year-old sitting down and learning just two letters, and there are 26 of them.

So very young children naturally have a hard time remembering all this, and if the instruction is not given at that time, when he's mature enough, To understand this, they may end up confused or disengaged, or frustrated. Yeah. So I want to add that also that there are parts of the brain that we want to be matured already, uh, because different parts of the brain can mature at different times.

Uh, by maturity we mean that a lot of the parts of the brain are coded with a substance called myelin so that the, uh, messages. In that part of the brain can get transferred more quickly. So there's actually a neurologic in a. Physical basis for this. So it's not a matter of, okay, uh, I decide that I want my child to learn early, so I'm going to get this program mm-hmm.

That I see there's a baby that's reading. So we really need to have that architecture and that foundation there. Mm-hmm. There's no conflict there. I think that looking at how the brain develops and that's the trend now, right? Yes. Parenting now they're looking at how the brain develops and understanding what your child is going through.

At ages 1, 2, 3, 4. Development is such a big word and the understanding coming from even, um, the medical field and the educational field, it never really stops. And now that we have the information, parents need to tune into that, right? So this is just memory. We have processing. When you're looking at learning to read, children need to process visually and auditorially, and it's so demanding to learn to identify sounds.

Put them together to make words coming from a visual symbol. Right. Even that act, which is your word reading, is, is really putting those sounds together to make a word coming from a visual stimulus that is hard. So that means they need to do visual processing, so they need to see what the letter looks like.

Mm-hmm. And then they need to associate it with the sound. Mm-hmm. So that's auditory processing. Mm-hmm. Pronounce the sound, sound out letters from the beginning until the end or from the left to the right, and put those sounds together in sequence and say the word. So that process needs to be formally thought through, okay?

It doesn't come naturally the way they learn to speak or listen or interact. Um, at age two or three. This is a sit-down process. The way you present letters to them and how these letters work and how reading is done from A C V C. So as consonant vowel consonant pattern versus your sight word, which is an irregularly spelled word.

It's hard. No. Even us, I don't think we remember how we, we learned to read cause it's a very long process. This is not something that is learned overnight and in my experience. Some kids learn to read in a month. Some of them learn in six months, some of them learn in a year or two, and that's okay. Each child has their own maturity process.

Um, developing and sharpening their visual and auditory processing takes time. So it doesn't mean that if they start to read a three. They are successful readers later on, some of them learn to read at six or seven, and they become very strong readers even if they learn late because what we're looking at is that moment of readiness to teach them when they're able to attend a focus, use a good memory bank, and uh, sharpen their processing skills the moment that instruction is put in front of them.

That's what's important. Yeah, these are a lot of skills that need to come together. Mm-hmm. For a child to be able to just be ready to learn to read. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there are many programs on the internet that claim you can teach your child to read whenever you want, even if the child isn't talking yet, or even babies, you only need to buy their program.

Then you can start to teach reading at any age. Is this true? Okay. There are a lot of parents wondering about that question, but what I see commercially. Is you have very beautiful products, uh, colorful and, um, toys or worksheets that you see that you can purchase online, or even apps, apps on your phone or on your iPad that kids can, can toy around with.

What I see is a lot of these, uh, tools actually teach only one part or two parts of what beginning reading is about. Let me explain that. I see that parents and, uh, generally teachers are concerned about teaching ABCs and how those sounds are put together, and your app can teach you that, but what I don't see much is they don't pay attention to the more important parts.

Now, when a child is zero to seven, what are the things that are harder to teach? Uh, what are the things that take time to teach? We're looking at speech and communication, the ability to listen and comprehend cuz that's your main basis for reading comprehension later on. Second, how well does a child use it?

And select the words that he speaks. So vocabulary development is something that starts at a very, very young age. You cannot teach that in a classroom at the grade school level. Just it begins when, when they're toddlers or even, yeah. The critical, yes, the critical time for learning the oral language is really in the first two years of life.

Mm-hmm. So they have to have their oral language skills there. Mm-hmm. And that's the problem if we put them in front of an app, that's going to take away from the time that they spend building these oral language skills and having richer conversations. Right. So these products that you see, I've seen also videos.

Advertising. My child can read it too. So you, there's a flashcard and then they're decoding. What are we teaching here? And we have to ask, what do we want to get out of a child when we're teaching? Reading this way? Now this is my take on it. You're attempting to teach them the alphabet and how it works.

But actually, a child who cannot speak yet, who's reading off of a flashcard tells me just simply that this child has very good visual memory. Such that bunch of letters in a card could be read and memorized, how it looks symbolically, and then there's a word that you call out when you see that symbol.

So basically it's a memory skill. I don't know if that child understands what the word is or can associate that word with other concepts, in the normal conversation in real life. But I would say that reading is not complete without comprehension. And language use. So those children that I'm fascinated also, I mean if they have a memory like that, it's amazing for two years old.

But is it reading? I would say no. Does it lead to successful reading ability in the long term? I don't see any evidence. I don't see any connection between just simply strong visual memory and recall versus comprehension skills. Um, I think they're two different processes. I actually wanted to ask teacher Tasha about this because when I talk to my colleagues who are developmental pediatricians, we very often see kids in the clinic who do not know how to talk.

For example, you ask them, what did you do this morning? And they can't tell you, but the speech delay. Gets missed because they have memorized the alphabet and then you give them a flashcard, they can name it or they can say the word, but when it comes to conversational skills, they are at a loss. And this isn't a judgment on the parents or anybody, but we just wanted to bring this out.

Because that's really what society tells us. Society tells us, if you look at social media posts, okay, I want my child to memorize the alphabet. I want my child to memorize all of these names, but there's not enough. Emphasis on conversational skills. Mm-hmm. And social skills. Mm-hmm. So I wanted to hear it from you also, teacher Tasha, from your experience, what should parents focus their energy on in the early years?

So if a parent listening to us has a young child, And they want to prepare their child for reading. What do they do in the early years to prepare their child to become a successful reader in the future? Mm-hmm. Okay. That's a good question. I think it's important for a parent to focus first and foremost on speech and language.

Language. Yes. So whenever we see students in our center who have comprehension problems or fluency problems, we go back to. What happened in the preschool, what happened in the early years, or even when they were toddlers, because our anchor is always speech and language. And the basic reason for that is because if they cannot process oral language in terms of understanding, or they cannot.

Converse, so respond orally and accurately or properly in a conversation dealing with print, which is another level, a more difficult level, would have further difficulties. Okay, so you're, you're already, um, using the ability for speech and language for your intervention. So a lot of us in reading intervention look at first language and speech.

In fact, when a parent comes in And tells us about their child's, uh, reading problems just on the side. I'm observing their child in our center converse with other children or converse with adults, and I'm already taking notes on that because that will be my anchor, that will be my indication of how I can teach this child to read if they can speak.

Clearly, if they can converse properly with an adult or another child in the early years, that's a big plus. I would put my effort and energy there for formal instruction and word reading. I would give it to them only if they're ready for processing attention and uh, really sitting down and. Being able to follow instructions from a teacher, and that will come, I think I have to say this now, but a lot of the anxiety comes from parents not being able to wait for that moment where readiness will come and the child will actually change behavior and say, now I'm ready for phonics instruction.

Now I want to know about the alphabet's mom. I see teachers talking about it. I see other children reading. I want to know that also there is a sensitive time when you will know, and that's the perfect time to teach them. So what are those signs to look for? That they're ready. Okay. The science to look for when they're ready.

When emergent literacy, as we call it now, in that stage, they're pretending to read even if they don't know how to read. I've seen a lot of these and they're very cute, so, Picking up a book, even an adult book, with no pictures and pretending to read it as if. Their language is, is mature enough, but you know, they're pretending that's one too.

Um, their play, they're interested in play now that involves letters of the alphabet. So they'll pick up these letter magnets or, or they're, they'll start picking up blocks that have letters in them and they know that there's a difference between letters of the alphabet and let's say just any other markings or ordinary pictures.

Yes. Or like logos. Yeah. Um, some of them will actually identify symbols, so, If you drive by a restaurant, they'll say, oh, that's McDonald's. There's an M, or that's Jolly B's face because there's a B. So they'll start looking for symbols and you know, that's already reading. It's anything on print that they can identify and call out is already telling me that they have the capacity to recall something we've seen before.

That stands for something. So I know, uh, there's a stage where children, they're in the car, they're looking outside and they start to recognize one letter at a time. Oh, that's m my name starts with M and I see the plate number of the car. Mom. That's m So you see that readiness when you are thinking, oh, now they can distinguish symbols, one symbol from another.

Then go ahead. This is, this is one. Second is, uh, you'll feel that they would want to sit down and work on a table more. Um, we've seen this where from the, from the floor, they're playing with Legos and blocks. All of a sudden they are sitting on a table for longer period of time and can actually do table work.

Another one is when I play games with them. I used to do this with my kids a lot in the car. We call it, uh, phonemic awareness, not in reading, but I used to play word games. Um, that's a technical term that that's a technical term. They're aware of the full names or the basic sounds. Yes. Language. Yes. And they're capable of putting them together cuz it's actually the beginning reading skill.

So if I say, I'm gonna say a mystery word and it's gonna be slow, you're gonna say it fast. So tell me what that word is. So the mystery word is, mm. App, what's the word? Say it fast. And then from the backseat, they're just saying map. Because if you come to think of it, that is a reading skill. It's just that with reading, you have a corresponding symbolic print in front of you, like the, or photographs in front of you.

That exercise when they're doing that, uh, really well. Or we can also be breaking down. Sounds like I have Map. Can you break down the sounds? Oh, mm. App. Okay. Those sound like nice activities to do while stuck in traffic. Oh yeah. We always do them. And like now that they're, they're bigger, they do it among themselves, even without me telling them.

So it's now rhyming words or like riddles? Uh. We do a lot of games in class and we want to see that the kids can appreciate rhymes. Oh yeah. Rhymes are important. So some teachers in the preschool teach a lot of rhymes. No, and the reason for that is because when we learn our CVC words or consonant-vowel-consonant words, the ending sound, sometimes it's hard for them to remember.

Right. Uh, when they already processed the, the first sound, the next sound, the last sound, sometimes, uh, they may take it for granted, but if they're rhyming and they, they recognize that each word actually has a beginning, a middle, and end, they're more conscious of, okay, I gotta finish, I'm gonna finish reading this word for them.

Three letters. So, beginning reading your basic foundation is, have them read CVC or three letter words with a vowel in the middle. Yeah. Oh, so that's wonderful. Thank you for telling us about the skills that go into reading. Mm-hmm. And then what kids need to have. So they have to have attention, memory, and processing skills.

Mm-hmm. And then what are the things that we're going to watch out for and even a few activities that we can do during this time. Yes. Now teacher, Tasha and I together, we started a site called Mom Teaches Reading because we saw how there are so many myths about teaching kids to read. And these myths are stressing parents out.

So to help you get started, we have a free guide called Prepare Your Child for Reading. Go to discerning parenting.com/reading and get this now. You'll get this guide as well as practical and bite-sized parenting tips in your email to support you in your parenting journey. And we'll also link to this in the show notes.

So be sure to download this guide. Again, it's at discerning parenting.com/reading. These are tips from myself and from teacher Tasha about getting your child started. If you are worried. How am I going to get my child started in learning to read this guide? Along with this podcast episode, we'll give you the steps you need to get started, and we have three more episodes with Teacher Tasha about helping kids learn to read.

Be sure to follow the Discerning Parenting Podcast so you don't miss any of her valuable insights.