Give the Gift of Removing Reading Pressure on Kindergartners!

This holiday season, give children the gift of reading. One of the best ways to do that is to relieve the pressure of insisting they read early. Some children might pick up reading when they’re very young, but others will learn a little later, and there’s nothing wrong with this.

However, children who are made to feel like failures at this age if they are not reading yet will have a more challenging time learning to read later.

Sadly, examples of kindergarten reading pressure can be found everywhere. A recent Business Insider report describes a mother saddened that their child had to repeat kindergarten because they couldn’t read or write!

Expecting children to read in kindergarten and putting this increased pressure on them became politically motivated with NCLB (See: How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children), dramatically changing that class and the demands placed on children to read.

Children have also lost the play they desperately need to make sense of their world and even supervised, unstructured recess!

Many children lost the arts, science centers, and social studies (See Bassok, Latham, and Rorem’s Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?). The study also found more teachers expected children to read in kindergarten in 2010 (80%) than in 1998 (31%).

This has likely increased since that time with mounting pressure, not the least of which is that students will fail third grade if they don’t read well based on questionable assessments.

A 2006 Newsweek report, The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon, describes how parents became pressured under NCLB to ensure their children would do well in school and describe many reading programs they turned to outside of school, believing they would help their children read.

…an entire industry has sprung up to help anxious parents give their kids a jump-start. Educate, Inc., the company that markets the learning-to-read workbooks and CDs called “Hooked on Phonics,” just launched a new line of what it calls age-appropriate reading and writing workbooks aimed at 4-year-olds. In the last three years, centers that offer school-tutoring services such as Sylvan Learning Centers and Kumon have opened junior divisions.

Since then, there have been many more programs, such as i-Ready, Waterford, Amplify, and others, promising reading success to the youngest learner, and many of these are sold to school districts without much accountability and, indeed, few questions about age appropriateness.

Corporate education reformers have turned kindergarten, the children’s garden, into hell!

Most individuals who proclaim a reading crisis refuse to question the developmentally inappropriate expectations placed on kindergartners. They don’t seem to wonder if there could be a connection to why so many children have trouble with reading tests or hate reading later.

In addition, these same folks almost always support charter schools, vouchers, and online instruction. Children have become scapegoats for the longtime movement to privatize public education.

There’s no reason to push children to read early. Their brains have not evolved (See: Are Today’s Children Developmentally Different from Children in the Past?) to the point where they must read at age three or five. 

Nor is a child a failure if they’re still working on reading in third grade. Third grade never used to be considered the make-or-break year, and this, too, was created by the same individuals who want to privatize public education. Holding a child back in third grade is troubling (See: FORCE & FLUNK: Destroying a Child’s Love of Reading—and Their Life). There are many other ways to help children improve their reading at this age without marking them as failures.

Let me tell you how I learned to read. I did not get much phonics instruction until third grade! I learned to read basic sight words in first grade with Dick and Jane. My mother had read to me consistently every night. I was very curious about reading, enjoyed looking at plenty of picture books, and couldn’t wait to check out books at the community library. I distinctly remember reading my first chapter book from the Honey Bunch series. By then, I had developed a love for reading and phonics, along with learning new vocabulary words each week for spelling, which sealed the deal and made me a good reader and writer.

Of course, some children learn differently and may need more phonics earlier, and good teachers with adequate university preparation will be able to identify the children who need assistance.

So, this holiday season, try easing off the reading pressure on young children and see what happens. Numerous child development books are worth reading to help parents understand when a child usually learns to read. The Gesell Institute’s Ilg and Ames has many that describe child behavior and development at various ages, and anything by Penelope Leach is another.

Share with children the picture books they wish to hear and read them as much as possible. Choose their favorite books, and include funny, nonfiction, and fiction.

Make reading enjoyable for the new year, end the high pressure in the early years, and recognize the threats to this journey that could make a difference for your young child and their love of reading.

Happy Holidays! Be kind. Remember, most people struggle in some way. Thank you for reading my blog. Let’s lift our children and their public schools this next year!

PEACE!

Reference

Ridley, J. and Sheffey, A. (2024, December 20). For Gen Alpha, learning to read is becoming a privilege. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-alpha-reading-literacy-crisis-privilege-society-divide-2024-12?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%20Gen%20Alpha&insiderld=