29 December 2006

Learning to read

After writing these posts on books I began to think of the whole process of reading. There are times when I think that the kids I teach are in a post-literary state - no more reading books or anything longer than a short short story or a longish blog post. There is hope though - the Harry Potter craze! I love watching 11 year olds ripping through those 600 page tomes just as fast as they can. And it gives me something fun to talk about with my niece Mulan.

But how did I learn to read? As I remember it, when I was in kindergarten (only once a week because that was the one day my grandmother could take me to town), it began to dawn as I watched people read to me that they must be recognizing words from the neat little squiggles on the page. Then I thought that I would have to recognize each complicated little squiggle for each word. That would mean that I would have to memorize hundreds of different tiny characters (that simply being the biggest number I could conceive of). I was horrified. Think of the effort!

Then came the first day of reading in the first grade. The teacher wrote RED on the board and said that sign meant 'red.' Then BLUE, and said it meant 'blue.'

Oh no. It was true! I was going to have to memorize hundreds of signs. Maybe more! How many words did we speak, anyway? All I could see was years of mental drudgery.

Which was pretty much true. Even though we were drilled in something called 'Phonics' - which could have been Sanskrit grammer for all I could understand, I was still learning to recognize each word in its entirety, as if it were a Chinese character.

5 Comments:

At 29 December, 2006 21:44, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mairead is learning to read, and getting good at it fast. It's pretty cool to watch to light dawn. At her preschool they're using a new-ish system called "Letterland," where each letter has a character (Annie Apple, Golden Girl), there are stories to go with each, and the kids have fun. They're halfawy therough the alphabet now. At home we're sticking with an old tried-and-true approach -- fridge magnets. We spell HOT and change out the first letter to see if she can sound it out. It is a lot of fun to see her really learn to sound out, rather than try to memorize each word. Of course, he memory is so good it's tough to convince her that sounding words out really is easier, but we're working on it. In the meanwhile, I look forward to the day she reads me a bedtime story.

 
At 29 December, 2006 22:10, Blogger Clemens said...

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At 29 December, 2006 22:12, Blogger Clemens said...

Well, I always knew she was smarter than her uncle Clemens. Carmen was the same way - reading by the time she was 4 or 5. She tried to make me feel better for being a slow learner by telling me it was simply because she learned to read in Spanish, and Spanish spelling is SO much easier.

BTW, hugs to Ms Squiggles. I predict her bedtime story will be read before the next Christmas.

ps: the school server is messed up - again, so no e-mail. We will wait and see how late we get in on Sun, but I would like to come up. We'll let you know.

 
At 29 December, 2006 23:22, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Email's back again -- finally! But if you have trouble, try logging in from here: http://appmail.appstate.edu/

How do I know? No joke -- we were sent an email with this information. You really ahve to wonder sometimes....

 
At 02 January, 2007 16:15, Blogger Clemens said...

I like the sound of 'Letterland' and have had fun trying to think of some names for characters.

In deference to the Byzantine Empire, B could be Basil the Bulgar-Basher. D could be Dimwitted Dinwiddy (an old Virginia history joke), etc.

 

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