“Mommy, That’s Not Reading…That’s Memorizing”
I remember it vividly; my sweet middle child cocooned on my lap. He was a kindergartener at the time, and was holding a book I’d given him to try his best to read aloud. I breathed in the aroma of shampoo from his recent bath and cherished our ritual of reading before bed – a habit we began at birth. I listened closely as Sammy read Shapes at the Seashore. The words he read were correct and the fluency of his reading rate was all good, until, his precious little hands slammed the book down into his lap in exasperation, and he said, “When am I going to learn to read, Mommy?!” My neck reflexively drew back and I asked, “What do you mean, Sammy? You are reading.” “That’s not reading mommy, that’s memorizing.”
And that’s when this euphoric moment felt like a gut punch, like I had been caught as the tooth fairy. I didn’t try to refute what he said because I knew what he meant; I’d been propping him up with patterned books that may have sounded like he was reading, but he really wasn’t. Sammy was memorizing each patterned and repetitive sentence and then was able to fill in the last word of each sentence by looking at the picture. He wasn’t sounding out (decoding) a single word on his own. In other words, he really wasn’t reading.
I felt nothing but guilt! Here I was, a former teacher and reading specialist, and I’d given Sammy books which weren’t helping him progress as a reader. I knew better, but when he became quickly frustrated by the difficulty of decoding, I had taken the easy way out and let him read these instead of doing the harder work.
Sammy at times does get easily frustrated (he came this way), and with a sister two years older and one just a year younger, I had rushed through reading with him, knowing I had two more stops. I had also convinced myself he was internalizing sight words with each repeated page: this is a… but I was clearly doing a disservice to his literacy development and even worse, his awareness of it. We were at a pivotal moment of mommy and son, teacher and student. I decided right then and there to do away with all books that would draw away from the essentials of decoding.
I dusted off the Bob Books box which hadn’t been read since Sammy’s older sister used them in kindergarten. I love these books, and they remain my number one recommendation for kindergarteners and young first graders who needed work on phonics. The Bob Books include only CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant) and simple sight words. Some teachers feel they are boring, but honestly, aren’t the patterned books equally lame? And I remembered my former students and my oldest child often laughed as they read Bob. Even the black and white stick figure pictures made them laugh and entertained them.
Using picture clues as a reading strategy was until relatively recently part of almost all reading curriculums. But with better understanding and research on how children best learn to read, there is a growing consensus on the importance of focusing on phonics rather than using pictures or guessing. The Bob books are great for this; they promote sounding out words and do not rely on pictures to help the reader guess at words.
The Booktrition website purposely places Bob Books and other basic decodables at the very beginning of the kindergarten section. Parents and educators can avoid bad reading habits by focusing early on phonics. But how do we know the wrong books which promote bad reading habits? What are the signs to look for? One clue – look for repeated sentence structure with one or two words that vary and are more complicated.
Once a child has developed a solid foundation of phonics, they can begin to explore more challenging texts. We worked through the entire Bob series, focusing solely on phonics and decoding. Sammy, now a second grader, excels as a reader. When assessed, he scores over a year ahead of grade level and most importantly, enjoys independent reading. Though he’s too big to put on my lap comfortably, we read together side by side. And call it creepy, but I still lean my head into his just to smell that shampoo.