C is for Clover: The beginning stages of reading

I was awoken this morning by a 4 year old figure next to my bed, proudly announcing “I know the first letter in Clover, it’s C.” “Yep,” I mumbled, closing my eyes again. Not two minutes later, she was back, “And the second letter sounds like “llllll” so it’s “L”.” “You’re right.” Three minutes later, she was back, proudly holding a page on which she’d written “CLVR.” She’d proudly made a ‘sign-in’ sheet for her bear, Clover, for her newly founded Animal Academy Preschool.

Maria has been working on the steps for reading for quite some time, and now, two months away from her 5th birthday, things are coming together. She got a sticker at dance class last week that said “Great Thinking!” She asked me what it said and I told her. “No,” she said, “that’s not right.” “What?” “That doesn’t have the ‘t’ sound at the beginning.” “Ah, you’re right, it doesn’t. The ‘T’ and the ‘h’ are working together there to make the ‘th’ sound.” The fact that she immediately knew that the letter ‘T’ did not make the ‘th’ sound is one more sign that she’s actively trying to read words, rather than just looking at them as a whole.

The journey to reading has been slow, and it isn’t over yet. Two years ago, when Tommy started first grade, his school asked that he spend 20 minutes a day reading out loud to us. Maria, even though she was only 3, announced that she too would do ‘reading’ too. So, I got out a few early reader books such as the BOB books and some Clifford phonics books. And for a couple of weeks, she would sit next to us on the couch and attempt to sound out the words.

For a 3 year old, she was remarkably good at the first letter/sound. She’d look at the first letter and say “C” ‘kuh’. She had mastered one basic skill for reading - she was able to link a letter with the first sound of the word. Unfortunately, her ability to decode stopped with that first letter. “C” “A” “T” would be “cat” or “can” or “could” or “couch”. Try as she might, she just didn’t have the skills yet to focus on the sounds in other parts of the word. The end of the word and rhyming were all a mystery to her. After a few weeks of struggling to decode the words, she lost interest.

This fall, as Tommy entered 2nd grade, and Maria was 4, she decided again that she would learn to read. In the year between 3 and 4 she’d learned a number of other skills that put her further on the path to reading. She’d learned to rhyme. At first, in order to ‘rhyme’ the words needed to be exactly the same. “Hey mom,” she’d proudly declare, “book and book rhyme!” But slowly, she got the idea that you had to change the initial sound, so she could tell that hook and book rhymed. This is a second crucial skill in terms of reading. By learning to rhyme, she was learning that that words are made up of individual sounds, and that there are patterns to those sounds.

Learning that words can be decomposed into individual sounds is a huge leap in terms of reading. On the surface, the idea of separating a word into more than one sound is a bit absurd, especially if you’re not reading. We don’t speak in individual sounds, we speak in words. On it’s own ‘c’ doesn’t mean anything. It has to be placed with other letters, such as ‘a’ and ‘t’ or ‘a’ and ‘p’. Cat and cap mean something, whereas the individual sounds do not. It’s only when we need to literate in an alphabetic language that we need to see words as made up of individual sounds. By decomposing words into individual sounds, we can easily recognize that the difference between cap and cat is a difference of one symbol, which is in turn, a difference of a single sound.

Despite Maria’s growing skills at decomposing words into sounds, she wanted to take a different tack for learning to read the second time around. She didn’t want to read the BOB books or other easy readers. She wanted to read ‘real’ books. So, we started in on whatever book she was interested in that week. This time, she wanted us to read a sentence, and then she’d repeat. Pretty soon, she had a number of books memorized and could ‘read’ them. I suspect she could still repeat D.W.’s Guide to Preschool by heart.

This process of memorization, though it didn’t put her any closer to actually being able to decode text did help Maria build other skills that are necessary for learning to read. She was learning how words fit into a sentence. She was learning to add intonation and feeling to the written word. She was learning the structure of stories. These skills are as important as the ability to figure out that ‘c’ ‘a’ ‘t’ is ‘cat’. After all, ‘cat’ only makes sense if you know what the cat is doing in the story.

Very recently, something else ‘clicked’ in for Maria, and she has begun to focus on sounding out words again. This time, she is able to pay attention to the sounds at the end of a word, and in the middle of the word. When she sits down to practice ‘reading’, she is actively trying to decode the parts of the word. She still needs a lot of help, and it’s painfully slow to read a single word. First we have to point to each letter and say its sound out loud, then we say the sounds a bit quicker, blending them together and she can get it. Vowels are still a complete mystery, hence the spelling of Clover as CLVR without any vowels. But vowels are the letters that are least amenable to phonic pronunciation, so that’s to be expected.

In one short year, she’s moved from pre-literacy to beginning literacy. She’s beginning to read simple words. She’s got a ways to go before she can pick up a book and read it, but she’s well on her way. Pretty soon a whole new world of written stories will open up to her. I can hardly wait.

We have three penguins living in our fridge

We have three penguins living in our fridge. They're named Captain Cook and Greta and "Baby Penguin", after the characters in Mr. Popper's Penguins. And they mark an important milestone in literacy. Mr. Popper's Penguins is the first chapter book that we've read aloud.

Since starting first grade, Tommy has to read for 20 minutes a night. He's a relatively fluent, but reluctant reader. So, we're keeping the books that we ask him to read simple. We've been through the entire series of insipid alphabet books: My Little 'a', My Little 'b', etc. The stories all begin the same way: "Little b (or a, or c, or d) had a box. Little b found some buttons (or ants or coats or dogs). She put her buttons (or ants or coats or dogs) in her box..." The plot doesn't get any more interesting than that, and it definitely does not improve with reading and re-reading. We've also been through the whole Clifford phonics reader series, whose only redeeming qualities are that Tommy is interested in them and they are easy to read.

But there is only so much of early, simple phonics readers that a mother can take. Enter Mr. Popper's Penguins. We had received it as a gift this summer, and it had gotten buried upon return. When I unearthed it this fall, a sense of relief came over me. I realized that Tommy had finally matured to the point where he could sit still long enough to listen to a chapter book. I wasn't doomed to early readers for the next two years!

And so our adventure began. Slowly reading a chapter every night or every other night, we were introduced to Mr. Popper, Mrs. Popper, Janie and Bill. As the chapters went on, we met Captain Cook, the penguin sent by Admiral Drake to Mr. Popper in Stillwater, and Greta, the penguin sent by a zoo where she had been languishing. Together Captain Cook and Greta started on a family and adventures.

I'm still not sure how much Tommy got of the plot, but he was getting some of the details. One day while we were driving in the car, he unearthed a toy penguin, a remnant of a Happy Meal. "Gok!" he said. "Mom, this is Captain Cook." Soon Greta (another Happy Meal toy) was found, and a baby penguin. They took up residence in the fridge, just like Captain Cook and Greta had. They live in the fridge during the day, and sometimes come out at night to sleep in the 'nest' under Tommy's bed. They get a bath weekly.

I'm pleased because our foray into chapter books has increased my interest in reading to the kids and it seems to be opening up new worlds of ideas and play. And I know that by reading chapter books, we're increasing vocabulary and literary skills.

Even without these side benefits, Captain Cook and Greta are enlivening the house. The other night, Tommy was watching Dad play computer games before he went to bed. Dad began to play a game called "Penguins". Tommy raced down the stairs, flung open the fridge, grabbed Captain Cook and Greta and raced back upstairs. He placed them carefully in front of the computer where they could see, and said "They've just got to see this!"

The great book mystery

Books were a mystery to our son for nearly the first year and a half of his life. As a dutiful, academic parents, our house was filled with children's books. Some were gifts, others I'd purchased. I'd even subscribed to BabyBug at nearly $4 an issue. I loved BabyBug. Tommy's only opinion seemed to be that it didn't taste very good.

When we sat down to read, Tommy had about a 3 second attention span. I could sometimes increase it to several minutes by letting him turn the pages and chew on the corners. But the moment I opened up a book to read, he was squirming off my lap. I even resorted to reading "librarian style", holding up the book from the chair while he played, oblivious, on the floor.

For a while, between about 8 and 12 months of age, I mostly gave up reading books to him. I felt like a terrible mother. I was failing in my duty to raise a literate child. The importance of reading to your child is infused into every parenting book, magazine and conversation about child raising. Parents bring their infants to story hour, their babies to the library, read books every night before bedtime. And here was I, academic mother, studying child language development not reading to my son. But really, what's the point when he just didn't care?

I consoled myself for a while with the rationalization that it's not jut the number of children's books in the home that matters, but the number of books for parents and the parental involvement in literacy. How can we expect children to embrace books if the only books in the house are children's books? Who wants to do something that's only for kids? When the adults in the house read, that's when it's appealing to children. And Lord knows, we were constantly engaged in activities involving literacy – reading e-mail, reading books, reading student papers, reading the newspaper, answering e-mail, writing on the computer, reading e-mail. We were modeling reading and writing for most of Tommy's waking hours.

And yet, books remained an enigma to him. As he became more communicative, and I observed him more, it became clear that he just didn't "get" the illustrations in children's books. I'd point to an illustration of something I knew he knew the word for (dog, car), and he'd look at me with puzzlement. Or I'd say "oh, look at the sheep!" and he'd look at me like I had two heads. Admittedly, some of the illustrations in children's books are pretty far-fetched. A fuzzy blob representing a sheep, or is it a cloud? A dog standing on two legs eating with a spoon? Nope, that just didn't make sense to my literalist.

And then something in the back of my mind remembers a discussion while I was a post-doc, that children with certain disorders (Autism? Fragile X? Down Syndrome? I can't remember) perform better at vocabulary tests when presented with pictures of actual objects rather than illustrations. So, as an experiment, I got several books that had real pictures, My Very First Word Book and My First Truck Board Book.

Maybe it was his age (15-16 months). Maybe he'd developed enough vocabulary to care. Maybe it was the pictures. But suddenly, he "got" books. Not only did he understand the pictures, but he understood that the pictures in the book represented things in the real world. I remember reading the Truck Book one evening. When we came to the picture of the tractor, Tommy got off my lap, ran over to the toy bin, and picked up his toy tractor. He ran over to me and showed me the tractor, saying "tractor", then pointing to the picture in the book, "tractor". He was demonstrating, the best way a 16 month old could, that he got the similarity. "Look mom, they're the SAME thing." He was so excited about his discovery. He had discovered that pictures in books had meaning. And he had discovered that words can label many things – what's known as 'context-free' word learning. "Tractor" didn't just label his toy tractor, but all tractors.

From then on, books made sense. We read My First Truck Board Book so many times its binding fell apart. We still had to keep the stories short. We still had to let him direct the reading and page turning. To this day, he prefers non-fiction to fiction. But, I'm no longer a failure as a mother. My child reads books.