The long road to reading.

[rivka]

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."

Comments

Re: Round O and crooked S

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Round O and crooked S

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"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."

Re: Round O and crooked S

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Round O and crooked S

[rivka.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Round O and crooked S

[annaoj.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Round O and crooked S

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Round O and crooked S

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

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

-J