Our school has a Pre-Kindergarten class, and until recently I stopped in only occasionally to marvel at the scene. However, the other day their teacher (“Ms. Preakness“) and I took two boys, ages 3 and 4, to a separate room. I’d heard they could already read, so Ms. Preakness, who just started working at our school, and I investigated what we could do with them.
I laid out a set of color-coded word charts that our school uses in Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd Grades. The words, a few hundred altogether, are somewhat randomly arranged, and color coded so that the same color means the same pronunciation. For example, a kind of gold color is written as “c” in come, “ck” in neck, “k” in kiss, “ke” in like, “ch” in chorus, “que” in plaque, “kh” and “k” in khaki, “che” in ache, and “lk” in talk. The color coding lets kids look at words they know (for example, pat and black), and see that a new, bizarre-looking word (plaque) is merely reusing sounds and colors that they already worked on, but this time there’s a different shape to decode.
The two boys, “Charlie” and “Chuck,” seemed delighted with the charts, and each started pointing to individual words and reading them aloud. Occasionally one of them would misread something, for example, saying “tall” for “tell.” All I did then was point to the word and say, “Do it again,” and the student would self-correct.
I started tapping out sentences with a pointer, connecting various words from the charts to make statements such as “I like to swim with my dad.” The boys took turns reading the entire sentence aloud after I finished pointing, then they re-pointed to the same words.
This was an OK activity. But it was my game, not theirs. They really wanted to work independently, sounding out word after word in front of them.
Here’s the kicker:
Most of the words they decoded were simple, one-syllable items like went, sand, truck, sick, and back. Then Charlie, aged 3, scrutinized the tiny print at the bottom of one of the charts, which showed the company name. Without skipping a beat, he calmly and confidently read the tiny print aloud: “Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. All rights reserved.”
Three years old! How did that happen?
It’s another example of “Life Without Parkinson’s.”
