"Solving is as primal as eating or sleeping," says David Kwong on the TED stage in 2014.
He then used a bit of magic to demonstrate evidence of the brain's powerful solving ability during his talk.
So what does this have to do with literacy?
Children can solve the language code in its simplest form in the beginning.
How?
1) Practice letter sound associations with the lowercase letter symbols as the child's first bit of information. (The Montessori Method begins this way.) The first bit of information is the short vowel or the hard consonant sound.
*m = /m/
t= /t/
o = /o/
etc.
*Wait on the other bits of information like the letter's name, capital letters and pictorial representations of the sound in a word. Instead of Mm is for monkey and it says /m/, just start with the germane information, the symbol "m" and /m/.
2) Enable a child to build a c-v-c (consonant-vowel-consonant) word. This lays literacy's foundation, also called the alphabetic principle.
3) The child is now enabled to solve. Watch a video of my daughter reading her first word in the back seat of the car off of a Macy's advertisement. (I pulled the car over and asked her to read it again.)
"Human beings are wired to solve," David Kwong said.
"You are wired to solve," closed David Kwong.
I've heard this idea powerfully from two other clever people as well, further deepening my understanding with each subtle twist of a nuance.
"You must honor the analytical skills of the child," says Brenda Erickson, founder of Counterpane Montessori and developer of Souns® for Literacy illustrated above. (I relearned all I thought I knew about literacy from Brenda.)
Evidence that the brain is wired to solve is described on page 72 of Pinker’s work Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. “Children make errors such as blowed and knowed more often than for any other kind of irregular verb.” These errors are not made because of poor modeling. The errors are made because the brain is wired to solve language.
We will have an empowered and enabled generation prepared for the road to higher levels of literacy by laying the proper foundation, allowing the brain to do what it does so well, solve.
TED Educators at TED Active 2014
