Should librarians or library specialists teach phonics to parents? To young children at libraries? Or to both parents and young children?
Every Child Ready to Read at your library (ECRR) is a parent/caregiver education initiative, directed toward public library staff, intended to promote early literacy.
Early literacy is what children learn and know about reading and writing before they can read or write. Early literacy begins with the primary adults in a child’s life.
“ECRR empowers public librarians and library specialists to take a central role in supporting early literacy through teaching parents and other caregivers how to support the early literacy development of their children.”
Ohio Ready to Read helps librarians to educate Ohio’s families on the importance of early childhood literacy. Visit www.ohreadytoread.org.
Kudos to librarians. I love libraries and books.
One of the Six Skills of Every Child Ready to Read in 2004 included information about phonological awareness – the ability to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds in words (rhyming, syllables, starting sounds).
Children with phonological awareness skills recognize that words are made up of a number of sounds. They can hear and create rhymes, say words with sounds or “chunks” left out, and put sounds together to make a word.
Children who can hear and understand how words are made up of smaller sounds will be more successful at “sounding out” written words when they start to read.
Children with bigger vocabularies have an easier time when they start to read, because it’s easier for them to make sense of the words they are sounding out and knowing that letters are different from each other and that they have different names and sounds.
However, the 2011 edition of Every Child Ready to Read was changed to: talking, singing, reading together, writing together, and playing. Phonological awareness skills were not discussed. Why?
The Ohio Early Literacy Crosswalk for Language and Literacy shows how ECRR concepts align with Ohio’s Early Learning and Development Standards. ORTR trainers bring a one-day workshop to Ohio public libraries at no cost.
If phonics is that important in early literacy for young children (and the science and research says it is) should libraries be a place for instructing parents on how to teach it to their children?
What’s the hullabaloo about phonics? According to a 2019 article in The Washington Post, the controversy concerns whether early instruction should focus letter-to-sound correspondences so that children can learn to sound out words (systematic phonics) or focus on the meanings of written words embedded in stories (whole language). And the debate continues.
I vote for phonics. And funding for Ohio libraries to house the phonics programs.
Melissa Martin, Ph.D., is a child therapist, early reading advocate, picture book author, and syndicated opinion-editorial columnist. She lives in Ohio.
