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Inside the first grader's brain
What insights can neuroscience offer parents about the mind of a first grader?
By Hank Pellissier
Reading help
Learning to read by "sounding out" letters in words is difficult for many kindergarteners, even if their brain's auditory development is excellent. One reason, notes Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., author of Making Speech Visible, is that memorizing the alphabet is misleading, because letter titles — A, B, C, etc. — don't sound precisely like the sounds they represent. For example, the letter "G" has a "J" sound, "H" is way off-base with its "AAACH" pronunciation, and all the vowels can be utilized with more than one sound. This difficulty delays thousands of struggling readers. To circumvent this, Herron recommends teaching kindergarteners to "pay attention to what their mouth is doing" when they learn phonemes.
Photo credit: Obsessive Compulsive Photographer
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