TINDERBOX

When last I wrote, Alex had started to show an interest in learning to read, and we had discussed possibly reading every day for a month. A few days after I wrote that post, we were doing something reading-related and I asked her if she still planned to learn reading every day in December. “Yeah,” she said happily. “…Because you don’t have to wait until then, you know. Your month could start at any time.” She hadn’t known that.

So the next day we sat down for a little reading practice. The day after that she didn’t want to, but the six days after that she’s practiced reading every single day. We read Bob Books – very, very simple short phonics readers – and Progressive Phonics books, a free web program that embeds short words for the child to read into longer text that the parent reads.

In eight days, we’ve whipped through the first four basic Progressive Phonics readers and most of the first set of Bob books. Alex gets to decide what we do and how much. Sometimes it’s only five minutes. Other times she stays motivated for almost half an hour! And her progress has been considerable. She can really sound out words now instead of using the look-and-guess method, and she’s so confident and excited that she usually shouts her portions of the Progressive Phonics stories.

On Friday, my mother asked Alex if she reads to Colin. I mentioned a couple of short books I thought Alex had memorized. She picked up Sheep in a Shop and said “I can read this one.” And damned if she didn’t try. She had bits of it memorized (you could tell because she read them fluently), but in other places she had to sound out words. They were above her reading level, as most words are, but you could tell that she was applying rules as best as she could. She seemed to have quite a sense of accomplishment when she was done. It was the first time that I know of that she read a real piece of literature rather than a text-for-learning-to-read.

I decided at the outset that I have no interest in holding her to her original plan to practice reading every day for a month. I do treat reading time as assumed; instead of asking her “Do you want to have reading time today?” I’ll ask “Do you want to have reading time in private or where Grandma and Grandpa can hear?” But she’s free to pick “neither” as her choice. Interestingly enough, in the beginning she balked a few times and said she wasn’t going to do it, but changed her mind as soon as I said “Okay, that’s up to you. You don’t have to read.” (Well, she decided then, maybe she would just read a little…) And now it’s clearly self-reinforcing. She can tell that she’s getting better and better, and that’s a reward all by itself.