As a child psychologist, I've spent the past twenty years teaching
children how to read.
The other day, I sat down with a lovely little boy whose parents
and teachers had done all they could to teach him to read. I looked
at him, held his hand and said, "Every sound I'm going to teach
you in this program will always be the same, no matter what letter
is before or after it."
He looked back at me with big, hopeful eyes, and he said, "You
promise?"
You see, being a child in an adult world can be very confusing.
And in order to learn, you need a sense of security. But when
they're changing the game plan on you every other moment, and
teaching all the exceptions before you know the rules, you're
ready to give up before you've even started. That's why only some
children respond to the methods used in schools today.
Security and consistency - that's the underlying premise of how
I teach; I provide the child a stable, predictable basis to start
with. And from there he can sail forth to make sense of the world.
I start by teaching the simple, short vowel sound of "a" -- not
the name of the letter, which often has no correlation to how
it sounds. And when the child starts out, every time he sees this
letter, he'll know that it says, "a", no matter what comes before
or what comes after.
Then I help the child move along step by step, each one at his
own pace, learning the sounds letters make and thus becoming a
master of all the most stable aspects of decoding the written
word.
Once the child has that firm foundation, he's ready to go off
and discover all the quirks and enigmas of the English language.
Simple, isn't it? Yet, that's the way I've led thousands of children
to learn to read - many of whom had already given up hope after
trying to learn by phonics or the whole language method.
By the way, I use nonsense words at first, so children will be
using the decoding skills they've learned, rather than just memorizing
whole words.
And I call it "decoding" -- not reading -- because reading includes
comprehension. You can only start focussing on comprehension once
the child can effortlessly make blended sounds out of the letters
on the page.
Finally, it occurred to me, that since this method works by well-defined,
incremental steps, it's a perfect match for Computer Assisted Learning .
And that's how dEcode™ was born.
Dr. Deborah Chesnie-Cooper
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