Recent discussion on a Facebook group has had me thinking about our learning to read years. We have ten voracious readers now, many of whom are frequently in trouble because of reading. Because they read when they should be doing math or the dishes or when they need to be gettng out the door for an appointment or when it is well past time for them to be asleep already! When we go anywhere, they bring books, some of them bring two in case they finish one and are left for even a few minutes in the car with no book to read. But there were times when I wondered if some of them would ever learn to read. It is definitely sometimes a long and arduous process getting from learning the ABCs to actually reading a real book. And honestly, there were days when I was less than patient listening to one child or another painstakenly sound out the same word that he just read on the page before! And there were days when we just didn't even try too, because sometimes getting a hyper 7 year old boy to sit and read a book would require actually tying him down... and that didn't seem reasonable, and besides, let's face it, he would still escape.
An actual excerpt from a reading session with a young Ronan:
Ronan: “I can hold up these books!
And the fish on a rake!
I can hold the toy ship
And a little toy man!”
Ronan: “It says a bad word in this book.”
Mommy: “That word is ‘as,’ Ronan.”
Ronan: “Oh, I thought it was…”
Mommy: “I know, but the ‘s’ sounds like a ‘z’ in this word.”
Ronan: “Oh.”
Mommy: “Read the next word Ronan.”
Ronan: whistles a few times, and then: “That is what the bird outside just said. Did you hear him?”
Mommy: “Yes, Ronan, I heard the bird. Let’s finish this word.”
Ronan: “Okay.
Ronan: “R..R..R Rake?”
Mommy: “No, not rake.”
Ronan “But there is a rake in the picture.”
Mommy: “I know there is a rake in the picture, but this word isn’t rake.
And it went on like that. It went on like that for years. Ronan could read his first words at three years old. He could confidently read a book, on his own, when he was nine! That was a long six years of listening to him sound out words and teaching him to focus on the task at hand and try to shut out all the distractions that invade his brain every second of the day.
His siblings were different. Each and every one of them. And for some, reading came pretty quick and easy. His oldest sisters started at 4 and 5 and were reading on their own inside of a year. Amik had speech issues to deal with in addition to reading issues and, like Ronan, Kris and I listened to him read outloud for years. Liam just didn't care at first, and then suddenly he did and went from being what most would consider a 'late' reader who really started reading regularly to his Daddy at seven, to suddenly reading Redwall and Harry Potter by the time he was eight.
Each of them was a little different. And we did lots of things including 'labeling' every object in the house, using online games, teaching phonetic sounds and memorizing dolch word lists, but looking back, I think there was only one thing that was really important: that we read good books together, we read to them and when they were ready they read to us. I honestly think the rest was mostly inconsequential in the end. They learned to read by reading books. Period. And I learned to be patient. Or at least I got to practice it.
