HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY USE “PERSONAL BOOKS?” IT CAN BE CONFUSING…

Mom Needs Help!

One mom, awash in homemade personal books and lotto games, wrote me this week saying, basically, “Help!” or, to resurrect a famous comic riff, “Who’s on first, What’s on second, and I Don’t Know’s on third.”

More specifically, she asked, “My child is 3, and we’re having fun using your program. When do I add new books? When I think she’s getting bored? How do we review the old ones and do both new and old in 5 minutes twice a day? I’m having trouble keeping it straight…”

So let’s flesh this out a bit.

Spoiler Alert

I bristle at long articles that save the information you’re looking for until the tail end, torturing you with blah-blah all the way, so I’ll give it to you up front: I’m going to suggest word repetition, and show how to do that. (Look to the tail end if you want to jump ahead, but since I spent so much time writing the in-between part, it would be just ducky if you read that, too.)

No Phonics

First, let me blow your mind: I did not learn to read with phonics (neither did Grandma or Grandpa). In prehistoric days when I was in First Grade, phonics was, like, so yesterday. It had been thrown out as unnecessary, and maybe even a hindrance.

So how did we learn to read? Repetition, my dear Watson. Repetition. We also learned by repetition. Oh, did I say that already?

Dick and Jane

Your Honor, I would like to present Exhibit A to the court. Here is page 62 from the first “Dick and Jane” book, which taught the ancients to read.

Let’s examine exhibit A. How many vocabulary words total? Four. FOUR. This is page 62! “Go” is repeated 5 times; “see” is repeated twice. And then we have our main characters, Dick and Jane.

I love this. I always show this slide during my reading workshops, and ask the audience, “So WHAT do we think was happening in the first 61 pages?.” Cracks me up every time.

We learned to read by reading our first words a bazillion times. And we all learned to read. The absence of phonics was a non-problem.

So now to your current situation…

Same Words, Lots of Books

Especially when a child is very young, as with the mom of a 3-yr-old mentioned in this blog, repetition is going to be crucial. Add Down syndrome into the mix, and you need to ratchet up the repetition even more. A child of that age is likely to get bored with the book before she’s actually mastered the vocabulary and is able to generalize it, right? Of course right.

So what do you do? You create new personal books using the same vocabulary. If the book was about playing with Fido, you can write a book about playing with big sister, etc. In other words, you can introduce one or two new HIGH INTEREST words and keep the rest of the vocabulary the same.

This approach sabotages the amazing ability our kids have of quickly memorizing books. That “fake reading” snafoos our attempts to gauge their actual reading progress, so we want lots of different short sentences in lots of different combinations…which personal books can deliver in spades.

What About Those 5 Minutes?

Elementary, my dear Watson. Use intuition, your BFF. As a child’s interest in reading grows, 5 minutes becomes 10, 10 becomes 15, and on and on. So use the amount of time that works for your child.

General rule of thumb: if the child is bored, start with the new and then review the old. Do the opposite if the child tends to be unsure or discouraged: start with the old, the familiar; then introduce the new.

Final Words

See Dad go. See Mom go. Go, go, go.

Go for it. You can do this!