The Reading Race

Well, thats what it feels like when it is "time" for your child to learn how to read. Of course, that time keeps getting earlier and earlier. They used to let us actually play in kindergarten, remember that? Now kids are expected to go in already reading or ready to go with all the phonetic awareness under their belts. As a homeschooler, i really don't have to worry about what kids in school are expected to do, but still, the knowledge of what the expectations are is in my head. Even if I don't have the same kind of pressure I maybe would feel if my child was in public school, I still know what their peers are up to, and what they are up to is reading at an early age. Molly was writing at age 2. I mean writing letters, the correspondence type. She didn't know how to spell the words, so I would sit next to her for what seemed like forever and spell each word aloud for her and she would do the writing. I assumed she would be a super early reader given how much she wrote. She wrote story after story. She had a little notebook she kept in our car and she would copy down the letters from billboards as we drove around the city. The car would go faster than her writing though, so often she would have only parts of the signs copied before we drove away. I remember flipping through the book one day and seeing, in bold capital letters, V-I-R-G-I-N. There used to be a stupid billboard campaign around Baltimore that read VIRGIN! Teach Your Kids Its Not a Dirty Word! Well thanks for teaching her its a word at all ! Luckily at 3 she still was writing, not reading. Thats how it went for years. She read at 6, fluently at 7,which wasn't early, but wasn't late, so I never had time to get too worked up about it. After all reading is the key to learning, so if you can't read...... I had bought Reading Reflex which is an approach to teaching reading through games and simple word puzzles. We had fun with it. Well, now Sophia is learning to read. I'm using Reading Reflex again with her. She really wants to be a reader. She can read 3 letter words, and some 4 letter words, like when you add an s to cat, she can read that :) Anyway I'm really proud of her. I'm relieved too, cause I know for some kids it's not so easy, and as a parent, maybe even more so as a homeschool parent, cause its your responsibility, noone elses, can't blame it on the school system, its a big "monkey on your back" until they learn to decode the code. So I'm grateful that Sophia is well on her way to being a reader. Knowing all the pleasure and knowledge reading brings a person, its got to be my biggest goal for my kids, for them to become avid readers.