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!"

Line 9 Powell!

"Line 9 Powell!"
"Line 6 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard!"

We were standing at a bus stop, waiting for a bus, and as each bus passed by, Tommy would shout the number and the destination. This not what I had envisioned hearing as I thought about my son learning to read. The sentences I had envisioned were things like "The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play."or "I am a bunny." Nope, not for our son.

And yet, given that Tommy has never been terribly motivated to read story books, perhaps this is not surprising. He is, however, very motivated to glean information from things like the weather page or bus schedules. If it's information you want, he's the boy to know. We drove to a birthday party in another part of town this weekend. We exited on NE 122nd Ave. When Tommy saw the sign for the exit, he announced: "The 71 bus goes here." He was right, of course.

Tommy has long been interested in information. Nearly every morning since he was about 3, Tommy has read the weather page with breakfast. We started this tradition when we were trying to convince him to switch from long to short sleeves one spring. "It's supposed to be hot today, you might want to wear short sleeves." "Why?" "That's what it said on the weather page." "Let me see!" So we showed him. And with this, a whole new world opened up for Tommy. He'd always been a bit disturbed by the fact that the sun would mysteriously disappear behind the clouds. "When is it coming back?" he'd ask when he was 2. "I don't know," never really satisfied him. He has always liked to know what's coming next. The weather page helped him be able to predict where the sun was and what was coming next.

In addition, the weather page has been a great source of functional literacy skills for Tommy. He's learned the days of the week and to recognize them in print. He's learned to read the symbols on the page (sunny, rainy, cloudy). He's learned to read the city names. He's learned to locate Portland on the map. He's learned to locate other cities on the map as well. He can point to where Aunt Mary lives, or where Grandma & Grandpa S. live or where Grandma N. lives. He's learning to read bar graphs indicating the high and low temperatures or how much rainfall we've gotten compared to average. He's got a sense that 80 degrees Fahrenheit is warm and requires short sleeves and maybe even shorts!

And now he's entering a new phase of literacy, one step closer to reading. And that step has been brought about not by basal readers or phonics instruction but by bus schedules. Tommy's best friend at school rides the bus to school every day, and often brings bus schedules in for the other kids to see. That has created a collecting craze among the kindergarteners.

Bus schedules are all the rage – we have a collection of well over 50. Tommy and his friend bring them in to school. They carefully color the white letters with marker. Tommy traces the route on the inside - highlighting the major stops in yellow and the route in red. And through this all, he's somehow learned to read all of the names of the streets and routes that the buses go on. Last night we were talking about the Number 12 bus. He announced "It's the boulevard bus. It goes down Sandy Boulevard and Barbur Boulevard." He's even progressed to making jokes about the names - saying "Marthin Luter King Jr. Boulevard". He's proud of the fact that he knows the difference between "t" and "th" and highly amused by the reversal.

As with everything, it's good to remember that there's more than one route into literacy. Some kids go the traditional route through story books. Others take the bus.