interactive reading

Dan has been working extremely late the last couple of nights, just as he did last week. This means, among other things, that I’m reading Damian his books at night; the bedtime ritual is normally something we split up but now I’m doing all of it. (Who else is going to? The cats?) Last night I picked up Green Eggs and Ham. It’s familiar and comforting and Seuss is always fun to read aloud. I love his cadences. Chapter books are great but sometimes what you really need is a good short picture book. A single gulp of story.

This time, just for grins, I had Damian read some words. I’d say “I will not eat them in a” and wait for him to parse out “box.” Which he’d do. There are some long diatribes in that book, the large guy ranting about how many places and with how many beings he will not ingest the green food. I let Damian read every single one of the places, objects, and animals. Box, fox, house, mouse, boat, goat, train, rain. Of course, he could easily have memorized it from the ten million and thirty times we’ve read the book. And there was one he got wrong: he said rain when it was actually dark. I asked him to take another look and then he correctly identified (ie: actually read) the word. After that, I know he started reading instead of remembering. And that was very cool.

Tonight he brought Click Clack Moo out from his room, wanted me to read that. He asked me what the subtitle said. I asked him to read it. "Cows" he got right away. "That" he didn’t. "Type" he did. Yep. He’s reading. I didn’t ask him to read much in that book, just various repetitions of Cows and Hens, Milk and Eggs. Then we read Froggy Goes to Bed, which is great for repetition. He read each “flop flop flop” with great relish, also the many iterations of FROGGGY! and “Wha-a-a-t?” I’m realizing the most important part of getting him invested in reading is to make it rewarding in and of itself. After having been read to for so long, he can now participate in the process but without ever being on the spot. I’m throwing him soft pitches, building his confidence.

But still. He’s really doing it. Reading words. And that’s absolutely thrilling. Today he asked me to read him a sign. I asked him to read it to me. I pointed to the first word. “No,” he said. I assented, then read “bicycle” aloud (don’t want to throw him in too deep too quickly) and then showed him the final word by covering the “ing.” He stared at it quietly. I didn’t push. I also lowered my hand. A moment later, he said “It says ‘No bicycle parking.’” So pleased with himself.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not bragging here. It’s normal to start reading around this age. I briefly thought he might learn to read at age three; a couple of professionals thought he could be hyperlexic, learn to read as he learned to talk. That wasn’t the case, and I frankly don’t care. Early reader, late reader, right on schedule. Whatever. As long as he’s reading with relish, and for life.

It’s such a miraculous thing, the process by which squiggly black lines on white paper turn into expressive words in a child’s mind. I’m watching it up close and still I don’t know how it happens. It’s like learning a foreign language, I think. For a long time you painfully parse out each carefully memorized bit of knowledge and then it starts to click and before you even know how it happened, you’re thinking in Spanish. Right now he's still deciphering text, but I can see his delight in that. Words surround us: on signs, in books, on bits of paper, on the computer, even on TV and on toy boxes. It has to be a kind of victory when that all begins to turn from gibberish into sense.

Posted by Tamar at March 2, 2004 11:20 PM