Learning to read

Brendan is making strides in learning to read. He's mastered many of the "popcorn" words (it, at, the, on, and, etc.) and can recognize dozens of others in stories. He handles his beginner readers from school with ease.

Sunday night, however, was the first time I've seen him pick up a more complicated book (a Spider-Man adventure) and attempt to truly read it. He had listened to me read it once, so he knew some of it from memory. But I could see that he was looking at the words and trying to make sense of it all, instead of reading from memory and looking at the pictures. He was quite impressive and stumbled on a few new words here and there.

Teachers don't teach kids to read the way we learned. We were told to sound words out. That's the last resort now. Instead, kids are encouraged to look for visual clues, make a guess as to what it is based on the story, use the beginning and end letters for clues, then sound it out (which Mrs. Benedict calls "turtling"). When you think about it, that's exactly what we do as adults when we come across a word we don't know.