rivka | The long road to reading.

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The long road to reading.

It's so fascinating to watch early skills and bits of knowledge come together into a framework that will, some distant day, become reading. I don't have any memories of that process, and I don't think Michael does either - so we're really seeing it for the first time in Alex.

Alex continues to devour books. She's memorized portions of most of her books - and even parts of books that we've just read at the library without bringing them home. She recites bits and pieces of books to herself, with or without the pictures as a prompt. She loves to chime in with words and sentences while we read. And she seems to understand how her books relate to the real world. For example, she once asked for some milk and then commented "Alex needs milk, grow big and strong." We were nonplussed, because that's not how we tend to talk, until I remembered that a book we had returned to the library contained the line "I need milk to grow big and strong."

She's known her capital letters by sight for ages, and knows almost all of the lower-case letters too. (b and d and p and q still give her trouble sometimes.) She loves to match up the "mama and baby" pairs of fridge magnets - capital and lower-case. She knows how to read and spell her name and the words "Mama" and "Papa." She can type her name on a computer keyboard (I am not as good at keeping her away from the computer as I meant to be), and loves to get me to spell other names so she can pick them out on the keyboard too. She's picked up somewhere that letters are read from left to right and top to bottom. She's doing a lot of sign reading, letter by letter: O-N-E-W-A-Y. The same for prominent words in books.

She's starting to talk about what letter words start with. It probably originated from one of our alphabet books, where I'd name a bunch of different objects and then point to the letter and say "Starts with...?" Then one day she volunteered starts-with information spontaneously, while playing. Now we ask her questions about it, which she seems to enjoy. She gets them right sometimes. More often, if we really emphasize the starting sound.

She really just seems to love the alphabet. She's joyful about it.

Someday, these two things - the letters and sounds, and the memorized books - will come together with a blinding flash, and she'll be reading. From what I've heard from other parents, that could happen a few months from now, or a few years from now. I don't have a lot invested in which it is, although my quality of life would certainly improve if she didn't need me in order to experience endless consecutive re-readings of Just Shopping with Mom. But early letter-lovers don't necessarily make early readers. In the meantime, I'm just in awe of how the whole complex mechanism gets constructed piece by piece.

For example: The other day, Alex picked up a copy of Fox in Socks and said the title. (She knows that book well - she's probably heard it a few hundred times.)

"What does 'fox' start with?" I asked her.

She looked down at the book. "F!"

"How do you spell 'fox?'"

Again she looked at the book. "F-O-X!"

Obviously she wasn't actually reading, but look at all of the pieces of information about books and reading she had to put together to answer those questions: that the symbols on the cover correspond with the spoken words "Fox in Socks," that she should look at the first set of symbols if she wants the first spoken word, that a word starts with an individual letter, that the symbol F has the name "F," that "spelling" means reciting the letters in a word, that you spell out letters from left to right, that the word "fox" is finished after the X... if we're not sitting down with flash cards (and we're not), how in hell is she picking all of this up?

I get the impression, reading parenting message boards, that this is the point at which we're supposed to get all excited and go out shopping for a phonics program and start teaching her to read. Because "She obviously has the interest! And it's fun for her! And she really seems ready!" Maybe it's just laziness, but instead I find myself thinking, "She got this far on her own, so I'm sure she'll figure out the rest of it eventually, too."

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Certainly sounds to me like she's getting it. I agree that the phonics program is not necessary. In kindergarten, I refused to do phonics despite (or was that because of) knowing perfectly well how to read, because I thought it was boring.

Yeah. We tried to encourage Molly to sound words out. She didn't seem to get it, at all, even though she knew all her letters, she knew the sounds they made, and all the pieces were there. Then one day I noticed that she seemed to be reading books we hadn't read her. She still wasn't sounding out; she was doing word recognition, and it just clicked one day. She figured out how to sound words out a few months later.

Some kids thrive on phonics. Some don't need them, or are even confused by them. Every kid is different.

One kid I knew was an excellent speller and reader at almost-five. His reason for words like "knight" was that "English is weird that way."

I know another kid who could read pretty well as he turned four. His first words were, of course, "stop" and "yield" and "one way" and other words from road signs, as that was his obsession.

(And yeah, most of the kids I knew who learned to read before kindergarten, including me, learned from natural exposure just like Alex is doing now. I only know a couple who were formally taught, and they both tended to resist doing anything to show that they could read, like reading something for another kid, helping someone write, etc. It seemed like a chore for them.)

Or maybe a trial? A test?

It was the same for me -- no formal teaching, reading newspaper headlines when I was three. I wrote stories by kindergarten -- couldn't spell at all, nor did I understand the whole thing about there being spaces between words, but if you carefully sounded out the mass of jumbled-together letters I produced, words would appear.

My parents had no desire to teach me to read young; I'd had a brother, four years older, who learned the conventional way in school. Any weirdness in my linguistic development arose spontaneously. I don't even really recall being read to, or any particular children's books about when I was a toddler. My love for the written word lasted until my second-grade teacher told me I could write a book (a book!! by me!!!)... only for me to discover that she wanted me to COPY a stupid Andy-Pandy book.

Teachers were the bane of grade school, for me.

I have a vivid memory of being absolutely outraged at somewhere between age three and four. I walked into the kitchen and asked my mother and grandmother something (don't remember what I asked, unfortunately) and they asked me where I had learned about that subject. I replied, "I read it in the Reader's Digest". They told me I didn't know how to read. I indignantly brought a copy of the Digest into the kitchen and proceeded to read to them. They were absolutely flabbergasted, as no one had any idea I'd taught myself to read. I've been inhaling books ever since. :-)

I am reminded of this passage from Caught in the Web of Words, a biography of James Murray (who edited the OED):

"(Murray) said that he was always interested in language, especially in its written forms, since before he could remember anything. He was given a primer 'reading made easy' known as a 'tippenny' and he is reported to have known his letters by the time he was eighteen months old. His desire to communicate his knowledge was also shown very early, and the first time he saw his baby brother, born in 1838, he at once brought his primer, saying, 'I will show little brudder round O and crooked S', as the greatest treat he could offer the baby."

The usual family story is that I taught myself to read when two.

The usual family story is that I taught myself to read when two.

Yeah, that's the story about me, too. We have a little more detail because my mother was getting a master's in child development at the time, and she did a bunch of reading-level tests on me when I was three. But they still say I "taught myself" at the age of two.

Me, I'm skeptical. I mean, even language-gifted kids (and since I'm now a linguistics professor, I think it's safe to say that was an accurate description of me) don't somehow spontaneously start to read without all the right buttons having been pushed by the environment. At least subconsciously.

-J

"Me, I'm skeptical. I mean, even language-gifted kids (and since I'm now a linguistics professor, I think it's safe to say that was an accurate description of me) don't somehow spontaneously start to read without all the right buttons having been pushed by the environment."

It depends on what you mean by that.

Keep in mind this was the mid-1960s. One of the things that was very much in vogue then were TV commercials that would have a blank screen except for some text, and an announcer reading that text. (I can still picture VW ads in the typeface VAG Rounded from that era.) So allegedly I picked up what that was from those commercials.

I can remember a twisted steel wire book holder, keeping the pages apart, because I wasn't patient enough to hold the books in one place on my own. I can still see that room, and I know we lived there when I was about that age.

I don't remember this, but one story is we were visiting my great-uncle and great-aunt when I was in the range of 3-4. I was leafing through Time, and my great-aunt commented to my mother about how the pictures in Time could interest one as young as myself. "He's not looking at the pictures -- he's reading it." My great-aunt wouldn't believe this until I was brought over and read aloud from the magazine. (The photographer in me says, odds are, I was looking at the pictures, too, but that's another issue.)

I read nothing but non-fiction until I was eight. Until then, I read things like Golden Wonder Science books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage History of WWII -- that sort of thing. When eight, my mom gave me Heinlein's Red Planet as a "bridge" between fiction and non-fiction, as she thought I was getting too narrowly focussed.

As usual with statements of the form, "kids don't {x}," (or, "people don't {x}") my reply is, "Most kids may not. But some do."

I am reminded of this article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/3118/):

"Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps--thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn't really seen enough specimens to generalize."

I taught myself to read when I was three, mostly by word shape. When I had to learn to read again in 1987, I used an adult reader to start with and it started to come back. I still read by word shape, though.

For the most part, I agree. But Michael's father says that he started to read before age three, and it's hard to imagine anyone less likely to focus on enhancing early literacy skills than Michael's parents. So I don't know.

I imagine that your mother did the same stuff that we do with Alex - which I wouldn't necessarily call "teaching reading" either. Reading aloud, making lots of age-appropriate texts available, providing things with the alphabet on them, answering questions about letters, talking about letter sounds, pausing in a well-known story to let the child supply a word, et cetera.

It's not the same as sitting down and formally instructing the child in how to sound out words, or using flash cards to teach sight vocabulary, but it's pretty obviously stuff that builds literacy skills.

My mom has always credited The Electric Company with my starting to read at age 3; could that have been a factor with Michael?

I don't know, to be honest. I remember watching some children's TV when I was very small, including "Electric Company" and "Zoom", but I have no clear recollection of when I'd have seen it, or much of what was on it. Unfortunately, my adoptive mother has died and can't provide any details.

I do think that some of my various relatives may have assisted to some degree, but they also didn't live in the towns we lived in, so it couldn't have been much help. My aunt taught kindergarten, and my paternal grandmother taught third grade. I remember my aunt taking me to the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, for some reading tests and to record some footage for some sort of study when I was around 5-ish, and I remember my grandmother working with me on word pronunciation, but other than "I was very small, probably preschool", I have no idea of when that would have happened.

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I meant by "environment."

-J

Heh -- reminds me of one of my favorite family stories.

I have no memories of learning to read; this was apparently also the case at the age of four and a half, when my infant brother had horrible colic. I knew he couldn't talk yet, but of course he could read, everyone can read!

So I climbed his crib to wave a piece of construction paper over him, upon which I had painstakingly inscribed:

"Brudder dear brudder please shut up".

I get the impression, reading parenting message boards, that this is the point at which we're supposed to get all excited and go out shopping for a phonics program and start teaching her to read. Because "She obviously has the interest! And it's fun for her! And she really seems ready!" Maybe it's just laziness, but instead I find myself thinking, "She got this far on her own, so I'm sure she'll figure out the rest of it eventually, too."

Oh, for Pete's sake. She's TWO!!!!!!! Any parent who thinks the next step is to get a phonics program is a little too invested in the idea of having a clever child. And 'teaching' a toddler is probalby a great way to kill their joy in the alphabet. Besides, she's not REALLY doing it all on her own. You and her Papa are stimulating her intellectually, by reading to her, playing educational games, etc. But there's a difference between playing educational games with a kid that young and actually trying to educate them.

I don't say this ONLY because of my own disastrous experience with early reading, although it's part of it. My mother is fond of telling the story of how, at the age of three, I seemed to have all the building blocks for reading already in place, and she decided to teach me to read. I then developed a tic in my face, and after some tests, the pediatrician said there was no medical reason for it, I was just the most stressed out and anxious three year old he'd seen outside of a pediatrics ward. Apparently he told my mother, with great astonishment, that he hadn't realised physically healthy kids that age COULD get stressed out.

Anyway, she quit trying to formally teach me to read, I quit having the tic, and I got interested in the reading thing in a much more organic, child-led way within a few months. And for the rest of my childhood, she never again tried to push me intellectually except in areas where I was lagging behind other kids my age. And I was correcting the curate regarding Shakespeare being early modern English when I was six (he said it was Old English, which is nonsense. Even Chaucer isn't Old English. And I got kicked under the table for horribly embarrassing the dinner guest), and reading Jane Austen at seven, so the not pushing thing worked out pretty well.

She loved Austen (did her MA thesis comparing Emma and Middlemarch) and talked about Austen a lot, so I got interested. I don't know whether she offered to read Pride & Prejudice to me or whether I asked her to, but I remember it being a special treat, not work. And then I got impatient because she wouldn't read it to me 24/7, so I figured it would be faster to try and read it myself and just go ask her for an explanation when I came across words or phrases that I didn't know. There are worse ways to raise kids to actually enjoy reading.

Anyhow, this is supposed to be about Alex, not me. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I heartily endorse your relaxed attitude. I meet far too many parents who seem to think they can build a baby genius, and it often seems to have more to do with their own ego than with their child's best interests. It's awesome that you guys are letting her be a two-year-old and just enjoy her pre-formal education years.

I think you're taking a very sensible approach here; remember, people have learned to read without phonics programs for thousands of years, and Alex appears to be following in that long tradition. (If we were discussing a five-year-old without those building blocks Alex already has, or a seven-year-old who wasn't making that last step of assembling them, then sure, try a phonics program.)

I'm dead jealous. We know Linnea is learning to read, because Radegund heard her reading a new book once, but she's not doing it where we can see it happening. It sounds *entrancing*.

For example: The other day, Alex picked up a copy of Fox in Socks and said the title. (She knows that book well - she's probably heard it a few hundred times.)

"What does 'fox' start with?" I asked her.

She looked down at the book. "F!"

"How do you spell 'fox?'"

Again she looked at the book. "F-O-X!"

When parents ask their children questions like this, and encourage and praise and value and get excited about letters and books every day like you and Alex do, flashcards and phonics programs are really not needed for stimulating the desire to learn and read. You are involving Alex in a whole language, literature-based reading approach, and teaching her that books and reading are of value. Your reading, and related activities and instruction are working just fine, and go far beyond just reading books to your daughter! (Of course, there is nothing inherently evil about flashcards and phonics programs, just in the way that some folks choose to use them.)

I think what you're doing is great, and I'm glad Alex loves letters. I just wanted to add the data point, especially for your readers who don't know that much about child development, that my normal, intelligent, verbal 3.5 year old doesn't recognize letters reliably, can't tell you what sounds start most words, and in general is not showing a lot of signs of pre-reading. And I think that's normal, and fine, and we do all the same normal book-loving household things that you're doing (reading all the time, letting her fill in words, talking about letters, etc.) My kid is a whiz aurally, but doesn't seem to make the word connections with the little bits on the page.

In other words, Alex is exceptional in this area (as in so many, of course!), and that's wonderful, but others shouldn't be worried (or jealous) if their kid isn't. Plus, you'll probably be needing to lock posts against her reading them soon, and I don't expect to have to do that until 5 or 6, anyway!

And I think that's normal, and fine, and we do all the same normal book-loving household things that you're doing (reading all the time, letting her fill in words, talking about letters, etc.)

Oh, yeah. I think most parents do. I don't mean to imply that any of this is because of stuff we're doing right. ;-)

For all that Elena was slow to start talking, the fascinating thing was that she was nevertheless interested in numbers and letters and identifying them. She knows them all backwards and forwards, and her favorite toys are puzzles of numbers and letters. ("Nine! Not six! Nine!")

She has one book in particular that she is starting to spell out words. I read the word "fingers" - and she inevitably says "f". And a page or two later will spell out n-o-s-e. For most of the rest of that book, she just picks out the Es.

And she's doing the memorization thing too - she'll recite a line, and then usually wants to hear us say it after her. It's a nice break from reading some of those books over and over. :)

********************************

I'm another of those who learned super-early how to read - we've always kinda blamed Sesame Street, though of course that only goes so far. I got kicked out of nursery school for reading over the teacher's shoulder. *grin*

To save time, we just need a keyboard macro for "Alex and Elena = separated at birth."

I got kicked out of nursery school for disobeying. Every time we went by my brother's crib room, I stopped and checked on him, and it made the adults mad. I got kicked out of kindergarten for being antisocial (which turned out that I was really near-sighted) and then I got kicked out of first grade because I kept correcting the teacher and eventually, the principal and my mother couldn't agree on what should happen (the principal wanted me to skip to 7th, Mother thought skipping hurt her socially and didn't want me to do it). I taught myself at home until we got stationed at the Pentagon and there was a school with AP classes.

Oh, this is so exciting and reminds me so much of my kids learning to read! We did try a phonics programme with

orangebird, mainly because both of us had done well with that approach in childhood, but it wasn't his thing. Initially, he mostly taught himself from symbols he saw around the place - the one I remember is that he somehow picked up that the "Golden Arches" represented the letter "m", and then that "m" is for "McDonald's", and so on. Later, he progressed by learning how to write down the stories in his head so that other people could understand them. I don't think he completely grasped the connection between letters and sounds until we realised that he had glue ear, got that fixed and got him a brief course of speech therapy to sort out the after-effects.

C was next, and being completely and utterly obsessed with cars for the first eight years of his life, taught himself to read from the captions on the TV coverage of Formula 1 races, because he wanted to learn the names of the drivers and the countries they came from.

Last was R, and she was quite similar to

orangebird, in that she largely taught herself because she wanted to be able to write. In her case, though, it was less that she wanted to write stories and more that she wanted to be able to write on her home-made greetings cards, label her drawings and suchlike. Unlike

orangebird, she didn't seem to go through any obvious stage of learning to recognise letters before she started writing them - she skipped straight to the writing stage, so what we got at first were random sequences of boxes and circles that gradually acquired recognisable shapes, then slowly came to be associated consistently with particular sounds. Initially, these weren't the standard correspondences between sounds and letters of the alphabet, but were largely of her own devising, so for a long time only

djm4 and I could really decipher them - even

aegidian was stumped! Over time, she moved over to the standard alphabet-sound correspondences, but with very idiosyncratic spellings, and those are only now becoming standardised.

I find it very interesting that R and

orangebird were both to a large extent motivated to learn to read by the drive to write, because that's not a process I've seen described in my limited reading of educational theory, yet it was very powerful for both of them. None of my three were primarily motivated by the desire to be able to read books, as I was.

get the impression, reading parenting message boards, that this is the point at which we're supposed to get all excited and go out shopping for a phonics program and start teaching her to read. Because "She obviously has the interest! And it's fun for her! And she really seems ready!" Maybe it's just laziness, but instead I find myself thinking, "She got this far on her own, so I'm sure she'll figure out the rest of it eventually, too."

Forget the phonics programs; those things (well-intentioned as they are) are meant for nervous mothers who are afraid their children won't "measure up" (as though it were possible to fail preschool). Don't push her to read, just visibly enjoy reading in her presence, and keep the house full of books. It worked well enough for my parents.

My parents tell me they discovered I could read when my dad was sick, and I read him Hop on Pop. I was about 2.5. I have no memory of this, and don't know how long I'd beenn reading at that point. My mom probably taught me the alphabet song, I watched PBS -- Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, and I had plenty of books and alphabet toys (blocks, magnets, chalkboard with the alphabet printed along the top, etc.) I'm at least a fourth generation bookworm, so I'm sure both my parents and my grandparents read to me, maybe my great-grandmother, too. But no formal reading education that I know of.

In first grade, the teachers didn't know what to do with me. So they put me in second grade.

I also taught myself to read before the age of 3, and from my mom's stories, they did much of what you guys are doing. At that point she was a first grade teacher, but she never even considered formally teaching me to read. We came home from the library one day, and I was teasing and teasing her to read me a new book. Finally, I got frustrated and flounced out of the room, announcing that I would read it MYSELF. My mom heard me in the other room, but assumed I was making the story up. She was floored when she realized I was actually reading the book. They just kept making books available to me.

although my quality of life would certainly improve if she didn't need me in order to experience endless consecutive re-readings of Just Shopping with Mom.

Oh yeah! I remember when Phoebe started reading independently; this, I realized, was the perfect age. Of course, she was five, so she had already mastered such things as toileting, dressing, and getting herself something to eat; reading was the last -X- for which I thought that life would be so much easier when she could -X- by herself.

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The long road to reading.

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Round O and crooked S

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