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

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

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. :)

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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*

[rivka.livejournal.com]

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

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

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.