We went to the library yesterday. While I was browsing on one side of the children’s library, Alex picked out a book from the other side and sat down to look at it. When I came back, she asked me to read it. “It’s called Froggy Plays T-Ball.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you have this book at school?” (That’s usually what it is when she reads something we haven’t read to her.)
“No.”
“Did someone in the library tell you what it’s called?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know? Did you read it?”
She smiled a little and looked down. Nodded.
A while later, we were in the bathroom and she reported, “I think there’s hand sanitizer in here.”
“Really?” When she was finished, I came into the stall to check. She showed me a little protrusion on the wall that said “sanitary bags.” I read it to her. “It does look a lot like it says ‘sanitizer,’ doesn’t it.”
“Yeah.”
…So I guess that despite the fact that she still struggles to sound out simple CVC words, on some level she’s reading. Reading some things, anyhow. I don’t really get how she can be reading well enough to know that a book title starts with “Froggy” instead of “Frog,” and yet still have trouble with simple phonics exercises. Still, I remind myself: I don’t have to get it. If she’s found some kind of strange nonphonetic process for reading and it works for her, all I have to do is not get in the way.
?
This is more or less what Linnea does – and then trying to work out phonics is really tough for her – and then she said arch-ee-olojist (not ark-ee-olojist) – and all along she totally denies being able to read at all.
It’s apparently not an uncommon pattern, according to my home ed mailing lists and blog-reading. Very confusing for the grown-ups though.
I learned to read much too young to have a sense of how it happened. When I got to school, I observed some of the ways they were (overtly) trying to teach my peers to read, and I read *about* learning to read, and I tried out what I thought I understood on my younger siblings, so I thought that “learning to sound out words in isolation by learning individual sounds and then learning rules” was the most important tool for “normal” kids.
Nowadays, though, I’m coming to wonder if maybe many people – particularly good readers – don’t learn that way first. Since most good teaching (whether at home or elsewhere) exposes children to written language in many many different ways, it might be very difficult to figure out the role that sounding out simple words and clusters in isolation plays in that process – and it’s hard to think of how to research it without being unethical. Also, it might be that the kind of thing you describe as “phonics” is more likely to help for kids who aren’t already grasping whole chunks of meaning when they are three or four, the way you or I or Alex has done.
I really liked your story of Alex finding “writing” practice unintimidating when she was finding “reading” practice felt too scary.
Yes, yes! Just continue to encourage, correcting only when she seems open to it.
I remember leanring how to read on my own, and there really was just an “AHA!” moment where the
word just… makes sense…