What comes first reading or writing?

My neighboring family is blessed with a cute little girl child. She is almost 18 months old now. This joint family of 6 adults and one young one, is a loud one. It is entertaining to hear them through out the day.

As the child is growing, so are their activities. One of the constant loud activity is the rhyme session, their favorite being ABCDEFG……Z, better go to bed.., and this always makes me wonder, does the child really understands what it means. And the bigger question I always find hard to understand is why do we not teach our children our varanamala (alphabet). I would definitely like to write a separate blog on our mother tongue.

So, coming back to our topic, from English rhymes to what each letter stands for, we teach them all. Now when the child goes to the first school – the preschool, we aggressively make them learn the letters, specially how to write correctly. Though our children are taught to recognise the letters with respect to their sounds, the focus remains on how beautifully it is being written. Pages after pages, lines after lines, we make them write.

It’s like you have a beautiful car but the key is lost. Now, what I mean here is that, children know the sounds but are busy reproducing the letters page after page. If during this time we introduce them to blending skills, they will automatically learn how to blend and read a lot of words. So, you have the key, car and you can drive too.

When children start reading, they start registering how it is written. With just a few right techniques you can make them learn to read hundreds and later thousands of words.

With reading comes ease of writing.