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Developmental Reading Handout1

This document provides an overview of the history and origins of reading. It discusses how early humans communicated through grunts, gestures, and oral language before developing symbols and picture writing on rocks and tablets as early forms of communication and recording information. Major early civilizations like the Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans all contributed to the development of writing systems, from cuneiform, hieroglyphics, alphabets, and more permanent materials like scrolls and paper. The Phoenicians in particular helped develop and spread the use of alphabets which provided the basis for modern writing systems due to their simplicity.

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510 views7 pages

Developmental Reading Handout1

This document provides an overview of the history and origins of reading. It discusses how early humans communicated through grunts, gestures, and oral language before developing symbols and picture writing on rocks and tablets as early forms of communication and recording information. Major early civilizations like the Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans all contributed to the development of writing systems, from cuneiform, hieroglyphics, alphabets, and more permanent materials like scrolls and paper. The Phoenicians in particular helped develop and spread the use of alphabets which provided the basis for modern writing systems due to their simplicity.

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© © All Rights Reserved
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Chapter 1 A Preview on Reading

Lesson 1
Lets learn from great minds
Here are some thoughts of people with great minds on READING:
Reading early in life gives a youngster a multitude of friends to guide intellectual and
emotional growth (Caroll Gray)
Reading is to the mind what exercise to the body (Richard Sleete)
After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless. (Chinese proverb)
Once you learn to read you will be forever free. (Frederick Douglass)
The delights of reading imparts the vivacity of youth even in old age. (Isaac disrelli)
Reading maketh a full man. (Francis Bacon)
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it excites, it gives you
knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
(Elizabeth Hardwick)
And as for books which contain reading materials:
A book is a garden carried in a pocket. (Chinese proverb)
A man without books is a body without a soul (Cicero)
The book is a mans best invention so far (Carolina Maria de Jesus)
I have sought rest everywhere and only found it in corners, and books. (Thomas a
Kempis)
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them
(Ray Bradbury)
Books we must have though we lack bread. (Alice Williams Brotherston)
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations.
(Henry David Thoreau).

Lesson 2 History of Reading


As a modern man you are surrounded by reading materials from mass media (such as
newspapers, magazines, advertising, etc.) as well as other forms of modern
communication including mobile phone and the Internet. But have you ever wondered
how reading originated? Everything in the universe including man has a beginning and
so lets cull on what history can tell us about reading.

According to palaeontologist who study fossils and other evidences of life on earth, the
first man was a latecomer on earth and appeared on the planet only about one hundred
thousand years ago. But even during those primitive days, man walked upright, had
adaptable hands and a brain which enabled him to devise ways to show superior
strength and cunning. And as he lived in communities, he was a social being who
communicated with his kind.

In the beginning, however, he employed grunts and body language using gestures and
postures to convey his ideas and needs to others. Slowly, he developed oral language
which enabled him to express more clearly the messages he wanted to convey. In time,
various circumstances such as the need to communicate to others who are distant in
place caused man to devise symbols corresponding to his oral messages. We have
evidence of this in the Old Stone Age rock painting and in the cuneiform or picture
writing. From these we have knowledge of the earliest human act of picture-writing and
reading.

Picture writings during the Sumerian civilization between 3000 to 4000 B.C. were incised
on baked tablets. They served to communicate and preserve private letters, business
contracts, accounts, tax receipts, royal orders and state records. Meanwhile, the
Egyptian civilization along the River Nile carved their pictorial symbols known as
hieroglyphics on the stone wall of temples and tombs, or carefully painted them on
wooden coffins. The Egyptians also invented paper derived from the papyrus plant on
which they wrote their signs with a reed pen and ink made by mixing water, gum and
soot. Other civilizations such as those in Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine used more
permanent writing materials such as leather rolled into scrolls. But the greatest
contribution to the progress of ancient civilization came from the Phoenicians who
adopted and spread the use of letter symbols or the alphabet. Due to its simplicity, it
was developed by other people such as Greek and Romans. The Roman system of writing
in turn became the basis for all the systems of writing being read by modern people
today.

CUNEIFORMS

HIEROGLYPHICS

PHOENICIAN ALPHABET

PHOENICIAN ALPHABET

GREEK ALPHABET

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