Missouri kids won’t learn to read well if they don’t fall in love with books first | Opinion
I carefully read a recent Star guest commentary about how to teach Missouri children to read, and I found one obvious item missing: books. The column mentioned the word only once, and didn’t stress the importance of reading books. Reading good books. Reading award winning books. When children read classic stories, or hear them read by teachers and parents, it makes learning to read an interesting thing to do.
This opinion piece emphasized the teaching of phonics and the work of the educational approach called the science of reading. Yes, phonics instruction is important for students to decipher new words they encounter, but much more important, children must form the habit of reading. They need curiosity to be transported to the many places that books can take them. They need to hold books, to curl up in a comfy space to read and to hear their favorite books read repeatedly. They need the disposition to become readers.
Dispositions are learned inclinations that children see demonstrated by someone (usually older than them) they admire — someone who makes the activity so appealing that the children say to themselves, “I want to do that, too.” If you love to cook, you likely have the disposition to love cooking because you saw it in someone who enjoyed preparing food. And once you have a disposition, no matter what it is, you are most likely not to lose it. It becomes part of who you are.
If children aren’t exposed to good books and gain the disposition to be readers, no amount of phonics instruction is going to make them read. And in fact, too much phonics instruction before they have the disposition can have the exact opposite effect: Children can learn to hate reading.
Part of the “science” in the science of reading is to assess students’ phonics skills regularly. Schoolchildren spend long periods of time on computers doing mindless electronic worksheets, often with their scores recorded and measured against other children in other schools and even other states. Students take weekly timed tests to see how many nonsense words they know, and whether they have improved from the previous week. The thing that science of reading proponents don’t count on is how much children hate these tests. Teachers have shared with me that they have seen students run from the room, cry and — worst of all — tell their teachers, “I’m not good at reading.”
Children from all homes, not just Hispanic and Black, need to have good books read to them not just in the pre-K years, but throughout their school careers so that they develop not the skills to become readers, but also the disposition.
Do your children have the disposition to be readers? There is a simple way to find out. Do they pick up a book to read when no one is asking them to? Do they read for the joy of reading?
Dana McMillan is an independent education consultant in Kansas City.
