Teaching Strategy #4: i, l, L, t, T and Keep On Moving

by Kristina Chew, PhD on March 10th, 2007

“BEACH.”

My son Charlie (he is 9 years and several months old) first read this word on Tuesday and, despite being too sick all week to go to school, he has been reading it every day.

On and off, I have been picking up whatever book or magazine happens to be lying around, and asking Charlie “what is it?”

“W-O-R-K.” “S-U-N.” “A-N-G-I, T…..”

The word is “angle.” Charlie has been confusing the letters i, l, L, t, T for each other for awhile—-they look alike, do they not, all straight vertical lines?

We used to “put items on hold” and say “he has to know this first and then we can start this. As a result, Charlie repeated drills on drills on drills of letters, numbers, receptive labels, and much more, to the point that he got very, very frustrated.

I think that Charlie knows his letters and numbers, but when he is asked to verbally, expressively, identify them, what his mind knows and what his mouth speaks are not the same. And so he says “l” for “i” sometimes, or “t.”

Talking to Charlie’s teacher the other day, she noted that he has been stuck counting numbers from 1-20 because he has been saying “twenty-zero” or “twenty-two” for “20.” His teacher told me that she has decided to have him learn the numbers 21-29, 31-39, et alia, and to continue to work on 20, 30, and so forth. “Sounds good,” I had said.

It is so easy to get stuck on details—he must say /ch/ correctly! he must know all of the lower and upper case letters with some percentage of accuracy!. Of course, one has to know that “a” is “a,” that “i” is “i”: Charlie tends to identify the letters better when they are used in a word; when he see the individual letters compared to a group of letters.

Perhaps it could be said, he does not lose sight of the forest for the trees, while I tend still to wander collecting twigs and branches: Charlie has the big picture in mind.

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