The Importance of Exposing Young Children to Wordless Picture Books
These days it seems that teachers and parents are devoting an ever-increasing amount of time and energy to supporting the decoding efforts of very young children. In the varied preschool and kindergarten settings I observed over this past year, automatic letter recognition, noticing the distinct sounds in words, mapping sounds onto letters, and blending sounds to make new words were common instructional focuses. On the one hand, this is encouraging news—a mountain of research suggests that these skills are prerequisites to the development of fluent reading. And, they haven’t always been targeted in early childhood settings. On the other hand, whenever we increase the amount of time and energy spent on one component of learning to read, we risk decreasing the amount of time spent on equally important components. In his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads , cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham warns us of this phenomenon: “When we con...