Almost all primary school teachers agree that teaching children to read is very special. At the end of the day, you are giving them the necessary tools to access culture and information. For this they basically use two methods: global and analytical.
Despite being described as opposing and very different, the truth is that they are complementary. Or at least both should be used to ensure that the child assimilates the essential concepts to know how to read and also, and very important, to understand what is read.
Let’s see what each method consists of:
Global method
This way of teaching sees the word as an indissoluble unit , a whole that has a form that is associated with a meaning. Thus, the child recognizes what many words mean just by looking at them, without even knowing which letters form it or how it is divided. Examples of this would be “open”, “closed”, “stop”, “mom”, “dad”.
The more the child or we do it because he fixes, the more vocabulary he will have globally identified. Words are harder to get closer to than letters, because there is no limit. But the spaces between them facilitate the work. The child identifies them, especially when we read to him, and they see over and over the same unit of meaning that is the word. It is useful to guide with your finger where we are reading so that it relates the sound with the written word. Having succeeded in the analytical method, the global brings speed to the reading . Hence the complementarity of the two methods.
Analytical method
As its name says, it analyzes what the eye sees , the letters separately from each word. The child is taught the letters and sounds of each one. So you learn to separate them when you see a word and start reading it from left to right. After the letters we go to syllabification, this is pa-pe-pi-po-pu , for example. How the letters sound interacting with others. It is important that each letter has its immovable sound , although on the contrary it is not the same: a sound can be written in several ways: there, there, there. This explains the reason for the spelling mistakes and also why the analytical method needs to be complemented by the global one. Because giving meaning to the whole we give meaning to the word and we recognize it without being confused: there is a place, there is a caregiver and there is a tree.
And they will not only know how to read but they will know what they are reading. They will not be robots but thinking people. This learning usually happens at school, but if we want to do our bit from home, it is key that we read and they see us as an example, that we read to them, talking at the end about the reading, inviting them to give their opinion and thus better understand what who reads or we read to him.
