A few days ago, I posted about how my daughter is rather reluctant to take up new activities. Things that might occasionally be important, like walking? Ah, forget about it. At least that’s what she said until she was one and a half and the size of a three-year-old, anyway. My reluctant learner sometimes needs a bit of a push so that she can get to the point of feeling competent. Once she feels competent, everything busts loose and off she goes! Walking to running, and now basic letter recognition to reading!
In the early fall, my daughter was just starting to recognize all of the upper and lower-case letters and their sounds. She had expressed zero interest in learning how to read, and when I mentioned it there was a big push back. I stopped mentioning it and waited, and in the fall we started on letters.
Quickly, we moved into phonics, but it was a bit of an exercise in frustration some days. Then she discovered true and false questions and she thought those were the best invention ever. Finally, at the airport on the way back from our big field trip to Costa Rica, I purchased her the Bob Books Sight Words. We’d had Bob Books from the get go, but she was totally resistant to them.
We struggled through the first few books. She read them because I asked for a bedtime story, and she reluctantly agreed. We played games with the flashcards – those she liked. And then the other night, after several days of working her to sound out every word in one of the books, she’d memorized the sight words, and she read fluently. Amazing!
Sure, she was still sounding out a few of the words, but she was using memory, picture clues, and context clues to read sentences. Then she did it with two other books.
Yes, I know that there will be challenges as we move into larger sentences and less phonetic words. But for a child who started to learn her letters in earnest in September, I figure this is pretty good. She’s reading!
Image courtesy of hisks at stock exchange.