Teaching Reading Takes Space and Time

We live in a catch-up culture, where people feel perpetually behind and forced to hustle near the finish line after being waylaid by hurdle after hurdle. This contributes to the false belief that we can make up in intensity what we lack in good pacing, but we can’t cram kids’ way to reading. This advice on teaching reading comes from “Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six” by Maya Payne Smart.

Ask any learning scientist about the relative merits of massing study together versus spreading it out over time. They’ll tell you that spacing between sessions boosts retention of the material. The proof of the principle (known as spaced learning, interleaving, or distributed practice) shows up all over the place. Numerous studies across the human life span, from early childhood through the senior years, have documented its power. And there’s evidence of the benefits of spaced study across a wide range of to-be-learned material, such as pictures, faces, and foreign language vocabulary and grammar.

Even learners taking CPR courses performed better if their classes were spaced out. So if you want your child to remember what you’re teaching, digging into it for ten minutes a day for three days likely will beat a half-hour deep dive. The spacing effect is among the field of psychology’s most replicated findings. Incidentally, a study found that a bias for massed learning emerges in kids in the early elementary school years, so you’re in good company if the approach feels counterintuitive. In the preschool years, the kids were as likely to think learning something bit by bit over time was as effective as learning it in a clump. During elementary school, though, the kids started predicting that massed learning would be better at promoting memory than spaced learning.

Maybe the teaching methods employed in so many classrooms give kids (and parents) the impression that repetition, repetition, repetition in one sitting is the way knowledge sticks in memory. Want to learn your spelling words? Write them over and over again in different colored pencils. Want to practice your handwriting? Fill that page with well-formed letters. Spacing things out when teaching reading may feel inefficient, but it’s more effective, more fun, and a better fit for daily life with young kids. Parents have a natural advantage in teaching more gradually, because we are with kids for hours a day over the course of years. We aren’t under intense time pressure, at least over the long term, removed as we are from the confines of a school day or school year. Nor do we have to find a way to meet the needs of twenty-five kids or more at once.

And keep in mind that the lessons we give needn’t be formal. Teaching reading to young children often looks like talking, playing, and singing. I once ordered a home spelling program that included what felt like 50 million individual magnetic letter color-coded index cards, and scripted teaching procedures. I was so tired from separating and organizing all the materials that I never got around to working through the curriculum with my daughter.

Ultimately, conversation over a few games of prefix bingo one week taught her more about prefixes, suffixes, and units of meaning within words than the elaborate curriculum did. Why? Because that was the method I enjoyed and followed through on — the one that worked within the context of our relationship and our attention spans. She loves board games; I love talking about words. Win-win. The takeaway: do what works for you, and do it a little at a time.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services