"How's my child doing?"

Day one... a child is born.

Within minutes a parent starts wondering and worrying...am I nursing them the correct way?  Is this the correct way to swaddle?  Do I have them in the bassinet in the proper position?  Will I be able to support them in all the right ways?  Will they get along with others?  Will they be as smart as their peers?  Will they be successful?

At every stage in a child's life, there are new worries a parent will face.  We live in a world where we look at ourselves and compare our success based on our own perception of someone else's success.  And our children are really just an extension of ourselves.

Hence the proverbial question a teacher hears..."How's my child doing?"

As children enter formal schooling in kindergarten, parents suddenly have a tangible system in place to look at their child.  It's easy to compare what they see happening in the form of growth between their child and the other students.   I recall taking my own children to the pediatrician for their annual well check-up and the doctor would hand me a sheet of paper with typical age milestones written down.  I would mentally check off all milestones reached.  Schools have agreed upon benchmarks that teachers are expected to have all children reach each year.  Unfortunately, children develop at different rates. On top of developing at different rates, children do not develop in a linear way!

This week for class, I read an article entitled "Sound Systems: Explicit Systematic Phonics in Early Literacy Contexts", by Anna Lyon and Paula Moore in which the stages of early reading and writing phases are noted.  As children learn to read, they start out in the Emergent stage.  Emergent readers know to read from left to right, they are starting to discover the difference between words and letters, letters and letters, and can read text that is highly predictable with pictures that offer strong clues (or representation of the text).  Emergent readers grow into early readers.  Early readers know their letters and can even identify some letter clusters and word parts.  Early readers benefit by working on phonic lessons that include vowel and consonant patterns.  Transitional readers are the next stage of development.  They are those readers who have developed sight word vocabularies that allow them to read without strong picture clues or patterns of predictable words.  These students can also recognize word chunks if they get stuck and they use other strategies to solve their word problems.  Upper level (more practiced) transitional readers may read easy chapter books.  As a former reading teacher, trust me, being able to read a chapter book means you can read in most children's eyes. As a parent, it also symbolizes success.  I'll admit, I was guilty of telling others...'he/she can read chapter books' when both of my children reached that stage.

Beginning writing abilities parrot beginning reading abilities and vice versa.  Children visually see by reading what they are learning to do in writing.  While reading they learn about letter features, how words are constructed, how to space words, how print on a page works, how to segment sounds in words, and from writing, how to self-monitor their reading (asking themselves 'does that look correct?).

Reading and writing are like Ying and Yang: they compliment and balance one another in a child's development.  Children, however, are not little computers to whom we can feed information into in a particular way. Then expect them all to come out the same, predictable...reaching benchmarks at exactly the same time.  Children are little people who bring to the classroom their own background experiences which color their development.  They may grasp one aspect of a developmental stage firmly and another from a different stage not so firmly, needing time and practice to learn necessary skills to more forward.  It is important to remember, individual children develop at individual rates.  Many children do not develop all skills at typical ages! And, many DO catch up.  Ever hear of a book called Leo, the Late Bloomer?

~ltk