Putting training wheels on a child’s bike has become a passé way to teach them to learn to ride a bike. Balance bikes—bicycles without pedals that kids push with their feet and glide along on—are much more effective; they teach kids how to balance more quickly. It takes a typical kid about an hour to teach herself (yes, all alone) how to balance on a bicycle from a seat that allows her feet to touch the ground without the added complication of having to pedal. Once they master balance, kids soon discover the freedom that comes with bicycling.
So, why don’t training wheels work? It’s because they basically change a bicycle into a tall tricycle devoid of a low center of gravity making it easy for a beginning rider to fall over or crash land, typically with a bicycle on top of him. Also, for that same reason, a child on training wheels who goes around a corner on her bicycle can’t lean into it, which is one of the sheer joys of riding a bicycle in the first place—that leaning, swooping motion that makes bike riding feel like unfettered flying!
In the literacy world, phonemically regular books—those with titles like Nat the Fat Cat, and Al and Sally are Pals—are the equivalent of training wheels for reading. While the titles are cute, their content gives beginning readers an unbalanced introduction to books. Basically, books that are written based on common phonics rules, to ensure that every word is easy to decode, result in confusion and frustration because phonetically irregular words are used a large percent of the time. The resulting content of these types of books is simplistic and fails to captivate children’s imaginations and help teach them to love books and reading, which is the glorious path to lifelong learning.
Having a passion for books and reading invites children to experience the utter joy of folding themselves into a real story or subject to which they can relate. They are then overjoyed when invited into the treasure houses of the libraries and bookstores where they can discover an endless supply of such wonders, filled with natural language. Literacy training wheels are a hinderance, not a help.
Sure, children need help learning to read…and ride a bike. They need to see adults doing both. They need to get the answers to key questions like: “How do I keep from falling over?” and “Why do the letters in this word say that?” But twisting the magic of cycling and and the joy of reading into something cute and simple can diminish children’s motivation for wanting to learn either. Conversely, when we teach children to do something that they really, really care about—even if it’s hard—we give them wings.
C’mon. Let’s teach ’em to fly!