My son, Kai, is six years old and lets just say that he can be an ornery learner. Or, maybe we can call it “fussy.” Kai has special needs. He has PVL (periventricular leukomalacia), Autism, Duplicate Chromosome 16, SPD and more.
I was a general education teacher for fifteen years before I became a stay at home mom. After I started staying home, I took the test to become certified in special education as well. I just thought it would be a good thing to have in my back pocket. Can’t hurt, might help. So I am dual certified. I spent a lot of time teaching pre-K, which I loved, as well as Kindergarten through second grade.
So when it was time to teach Kai his letters and sounds, I had a lot of strategies at my fingertips. I found, after a huge amount of trial and error, that Kai learns best in the bathtub. There is something about being immersed in water, in the bathroom with little to no distraction and one on one time with me that helps him to focus. I found a big plastic bowl and purchased foam letters from the store. Uppercase was easy to find. Lowercase was nowhere to be found. In fact, I had to track it down online. This was in 2016 and I just looked to see if it was still available and it isn’t. It was the Munchkin Sea and Learn Bathtub Letters in lowercase. I have them. I just spent an hour trying to track down lowercase for you too, to no avail. Here’s hoping they bring them back. As an alternative you could make your own lowercase foam letters or use foam magnetic ones. Not sure what this would do to the magnetic part. I will update this post as soon as I can find lowercase letters.
Why am I so interested in lowercase letters, anyway? It is interesting to me that people usually seem to start teaching their children uppercase first, when the majority of letters that we see when we are reading are lowercase. Lowercase is also introduced first in the Montessori method, which is a very hands-on, individualized learning approach. I believe that it is better to start with lowercase but don’t freak out if you already started on uppercase. There are lots of ways to teach letters correctly, this is just my preference. You could also start teaching the sounds first, but I didn’t. Nothing wrong with that approach either.
PVL means that Kai has damaged white brain matter. He IS able to learn but he needs extensive training in the simplest things to master them. Kai was three years old at the time we began and I knew that he needed a ton of repetition to learn his letters and sounds, so I was determined to start early. I would dump all of the uppercase and lowercase letters into the tub (which thrilled him with all of their bright colors) and set the big plastic bowl floating on top of the water. Then, one by one, I would pick up the letters, in any order and show them to him. I would tell him the name of the letter. I would not ask him to repeat what I said. All he had to do was observe. And then I would put the letter in the bowl while saying, “Put in.” And then repeat. “C. Put in. L. Put in.” Kai didn’t know how to put in yet, so this was a good way for him to learn that task as well. After a while, I would show him the letter, tell him the name and hand it to him. I would say, “Put in.” Then I would guide his hand and help him to drop the letter into the bowl.
We would keep going until he seemed to tire of it or my back was getting too sore from bending over. Then I would sing a clean up song and put all of the letters into the bowl. I’d give Kai a round of applause. And then we would start the cleaning him part of the bath.
We did this consistently, every day for A YEAR AND A HALF (except on the odd night when we would skip bath). This is what happened over time. One day, I held up a letter and Kai TOLD ME the name of it (the joy was immeasureable). Then he began to “put in,” by himself. Then, when I would sing the clean up song, he started to grab handfuls to put in the bowl to clean up. Eventually, we moved on. I would hold up the letter and say, “Kai, what letter is this?” And he would tell me. He still had pronunciation problems with letters like X but he was consistent in the way that he pronounced them every time. So, he knew them.
Kai now had all of his letter names for uppercase and lowercase. It was time to move to sounds. So, I went back to my earlier method. I started by holding up the letter and saying, “Kai, what letter is this?” Kai would tell me. I would say, “Yes, you’re right, it is the letter D and it makes the sound “D.” And we would just continue on, every day doing it that way until I was able to ask Kai, “What letter is this? What sound does it make?” And he could tell me. At this stage Kai was almost totally nonverbal otherwise. He began to be able to say the names and sounds of the letters due to the massive amount of repetition he was receiving. This won’t happen with every child but – and this is key – don’t think that if you don’t hear them say the letter name and sound that they don’t know it. JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN’T TELL YOU DOESN’T MEAN THAT THEY DON’T KNOW.
Learning the letter sounds took probably an additional year. So, in two and a half years, with massive amounts of repetition, Kai was able to learn his letters and sounds.
It seems like a long time, doesn’t it? Here’s the thing. The time goes by whether you are doing it or not. Two years of doing nothing ends in two years. Two years of doing something also ends in two years. The big difference is that there is a reward, an accomplishment, at the end.
I want Kai to become a reader. It may take 10-15 years for him to read even the simplest of books. And if it never happens, he will read in a different way. There are books on tape, books on video. We’ll see. The next step for him is sight words. It is definitely going to be a challenge but the reward is so sweet, how could I not?
What would you like your child to be able to do in two years or five years or ten years?