Reading Readiness
MM has been talking about learning to read for months now, especially now that AJ is reading so fluently. However, she has so far liked the idea of learning to read better than the actual process.
I've devised all kinds of games and activities to get her to pay attention long enough to actually learn the sounds of each letter and be able to say them consistently when she sees them. But she hasn't been interested in practicing them enough to get consistent with them, and still gets many of them mixed up.
We've had a few brief tries at sounding out simple words, but when she didn't want to do it I didn't push it too much. She's only three, after all. I figured she'd give reading her full attention when she was ready, and I didn't want to ruin the excitement for her by making it too much work.
Besides, she's a child of extremely strong will and opinions, and tends to dig in her feet if I push too hard. Although it is possible to get her to do something she doesn't want to do, I try to choose those battles very carefully.
Yesterday, she plopped herself down next to me and announced, "Mommy, I'm going to learn to wead. Now. I'm going to wead dis book--the whole thing. You have to help me, okay?"
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I thought the book might be much too hard for her and end up being frustrating. It was a book from halfway through the second series of the Bob books--not exactly the best choice for a first attempt at reading a book. But she was insistent that it was the book she was going to read.
So we sat down, and she read. She really read. I helped her with the sounds of the letters she didn't remember, and she sounded out words. That's my MM for you--she tends to do the unexpected and ignore the traditional order of things. So what if she didn't know all her letters--she wanted to read, and read she did.
With some help, she read the whole book. Then I pulled out the first book in the early reader series that I (and AJ) learned to read with: Mac and Tab, about a cat and a rat. She read the first couple of pages of that, and then was done for the day.
Today she sat down while I was nursing E and informed me that she wanted to read all of Mac and Tab.
She has such a unique learning style. She fidgeted, joked and played so much between words that I kept thinking she was bored or not concentrating. But every time I suggested that we stop and finish it later, she protested. "No, I'm going to wead dis whole book." And she'd go back to sounding out words.
The ease and fluidity of her reading increased significantly just between yesterday and today. Yesterday she was frequently trying to put the last letter first, and often guessing at the words instead of trying to sound out the letters. Today she didn't do that much, and had a much easier time putting the sounds together to make a word.
She responds visually to words much differently than AJ did when she was beginning to read. AJ tended to concentrate on the letters so much that she would lose the word. At first she was more interested in how the letters fit together and made different sounds than in the words themselves. But to MM, the letters are important only as a way to get to the meaning of the sentence.
MM tends to connect to the word as a whole. Once she reads a word, when she looks at a page the other instances of that word leap out at her.
She read the word "rat", and a moment later she was laughing in excitement, pointing out the same word in the next sentence. "Mommy, they match! Look, it's the same word again. Rat. And rat over here. Look! There's another one!"
She grasped the story quickly, laughing aloud when she read, "Tab has a nap on the mat. Mac has a nap on Tab."
The spark has caught. Her interest in reading has ignited.
DH and I have been saying for some time that MM will read when she's ready. Watch out, world: she's ready.
I've devised all kinds of games and activities to get her to pay attention long enough to actually learn the sounds of each letter and be able to say them consistently when she sees them. But she hasn't been interested in practicing them enough to get consistent with them, and still gets many of them mixed up.
We've had a few brief tries at sounding out simple words, but when she didn't want to do it I didn't push it too much. She's only three, after all. I figured she'd give reading her full attention when she was ready, and I didn't want to ruin the excitement for her by making it too much work.
Besides, she's a child of extremely strong will and opinions, and tends to dig in her feet if I push too hard. Although it is possible to get her to do something she doesn't want to do, I try to choose those battles very carefully.
Yesterday, she plopped herself down next to me and announced, "Mommy, I'm going to learn to wead. Now. I'm going to wead dis book--the whole thing. You have to help me, okay?"
################################
I thought the book might be much too hard for her and end up being frustrating. It was a book from halfway through the second series of the Bob books--not exactly the best choice for a first attempt at reading a book. But she was insistent that it was the book she was going to read.
So we sat down, and she read. She really read. I helped her with the sounds of the letters she didn't remember, and she sounded out words. That's my MM for you--she tends to do the unexpected and ignore the traditional order of things. So what if she didn't know all her letters--she wanted to read, and read she did.
With some help, she read the whole book. Then I pulled out the first book in the early reader series that I (and AJ) learned to read with: Mac and Tab, about a cat and a rat. She read the first couple of pages of that, and then was done for the day.
Today she sat down while I was nursing E and informed me that she wanted to read all of Mac and Tab.
She has such a unique learning style. She fidgeted, joked and played so much between words that I kept thinking she was bored or not concentrating. But every time I suggested that we stop and finish it later, she protested. "No, I'm going to wead dis whole book." And she'd go back to sounding out words.
The ease and fluidity of her reading increased significantly just between yesterday and today. Yesterday she was frequently trying to put the last letter first, and often guessing at the words instead of trying to sound out the letters. Today she didn't do that much, and had a much easier time putting the sounds together to make a word.
She responds visually to words much differently than AJ did when she was beginning to read. AJ tended to concentrate on the letters so much that she would lose the word. At first she was more interested in how the letters fit together and made different sounds than in the words themselves. But to MM, the letters are important only as a way to get to the meaning of the sentence.
MM tends to connect to the word as a whole. Once she reads a word, when she looks at a page the other instances of that word leap out at her.
She read the word "rat", and a moment later she was laughing in excitement, pointing out the same word in the next sentence. "Mommy, they match! Look, it's the same word again. Rat. And rat over here. Look! There's another one!"
She grasped the story quickly, laughing aloud when she read, "Tab has a nap on the mat. Mac has a nap on Tab."
The spark has caught. Her interest in reading has ignited.
DH and I have been saying for some time that MM will read when she's ready. Watch out, world: she's ready.
Labels: books, kid stuff, learning
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Posted by purple_kangaroo at 1:46 PM[Permanent link]
4 Comments:
Congratulations to both of you! What a wonderful surprise :)
Congratulations to MM! I love her learning style.
I learned to read at MM's age when I was given a Richard Scarry word book. I loved the pictures and I was able to associate each word with the picture of what it was. The first step was memorizing whole words: this group of symbols meant "car" and this one meant "carrot" and so on. In the course of things, I began to be curious about individual letters and sound groups: looking at the pictures of "mother" and "father" and "grandmother" and "grandfather" next to one another, I noticed the similarities in the spellings and became able to sound out those letter groups wherever I found them. Parents helped when I asked them to, but I did a lot of this cryptography on my own. And now here I am, 50 years later, commenting on your blog!
R2Ks, CCW and Richard, thanks. It's so fascinating to me how the two girls approach things differently. I try to really concentrate on phonics and learning to use the letter sounds in my teaching approach, so MM's taking more of a whole-word approach caught me by surprise.
It's good to hear, RLC, that such an approach can be effective when child-led. :)
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