That’s how long I’ve been teaching Oscar to read. I didn’t realize it until my friend asked me a couple of days ago, after Oscar read one of his Bob Books to her:
Polly was a jolly bird.
"Hello, Polly," said Jon. "Hello, Polly," said Dolly.
Polly flapped. Polly bobbed.
Polly flew to Dolly. Polly sat on Dolly.
Jon and Dolly went to a shop. The shop had lolly-pops.
Jon had six pennies. Dolly had ten pennies.
Jon and Dolly got lolly-pops.
"Umm, umm, umm!" said Jon. "Yum, yum, yum!" said Dolly.
Polly wants a lolly-pop.
"O.K., Polly," said Dolly. "O.K., Polly," said Jon.
The end.
He read it flawlessly — not too surprising to me, since he’s been working on that one all week — but she had a point. He’s come pretty far in a year! And so have I. It seems like we’ve been doing reading forever. Maybe, she suggested, because there are just so many details to cover. And because my friends and I developed the "curriculum" essentially on our own (most of the groundwork being laid by the one with the oldest child), comparing notes about what worked and what didn’t.
I still remember sitting down with Oscar — he was about four and a half years old — and introducing the very first spellings: m for /m/ and a for /a/ — that is, the so-called "short A sound." (Who came up with the idea of calling vowels "short" and "long," incidentally? Any vowel can last as long as you have breath). I used Montessori-style "sandpaper letters" — kind of like these, except I made my own from textured paper and cardstock — to introduce the phonemes and the spellings. That first day I showed him the first word, too: am.
The next day I added the spellings s for /s/ and o for /o/, and showed him the words mass, mom, and sam. Each day we added one or two more spellings, and a few more words became available. We practiced tracing the sandpaper letters, writing the spellings with a finger in a tray of salt, and flashcard-type drills. I knew that many kids get the names of letters and the sounds they spell mixed up, so I never mentioned the names of the letters (more on that in this post).
I remember that it took quite a long time before Oscar made the connection between phonemes and words. He would dutifully "read" a series of discrete phonemes from a paper: I would show him sat and he would say "sss. aaa. t." But he was completely unable to hear the word "sat" in that string of noises. Day after day I’d say "Slide them together: sat." Day after day he could not understand what I meant. I tried word-building: having him listen for the sounds in sat and put the letter tiles a, s, t in the correct order. That was frustrating for both of us. Then one day, he simply got it. He understood what I meant by "slide them together into a word." I don’t know what happened inside his brain, but that was the missing piece.
After that, we could go much more quickly. After the single-letter spellings were mastered, I added some digraphs. I remember that the first one was er for /er/. Lots of words there. Then sh for /sh/. The first so-called "long vowel" was ai for /ae/— even though he’d had the single letter a for quite a long time, I always had it spell /a/ as in hat. I guess if there was any theory behind it all, it was "Avoid breaking the bad news — that English spellings are complicated and often ambiguous — until it’s absolutely necessary." I didn’t want him to have to grasp how difficult reading can be until he had plenty of experience successfully reading lots of words.
There were some discoveries along the way. I thought that, to keep it interesting, I’d have to give him sentences and stories early on. But that was just frustrating — it was too hard for him to keep a whole sentence in mind while he was struggling to decode one word at a time. What a relief it was to abandon the sentences and stories in favor of simple lists of words (especially since my approach precluded using common "sight words" — it’s hard to compose good sentences without "the" or "some" or "you!") I tried to choose words that I knew would please him. ("Daddy! Daddy! I can read jigsaw!") Occasionally I’d challenge his memory with two-word compounds like pop can. Only after he got much faster at reading individual words did I start with sentences and stories.
Once I’d introduced one spelling each for nearly all the English phonemes — forty-two or so — I delivered "bad news" that most of them could, in fact, be spelled several different ways. And then I embarked on many weeks of introducing the more common spellings of forty different phonemes, the forty spellings in somewhat random order. I tried to stay ahead of where he was. Just this morning I finished writing the last ten lessons, covering the sounds /v/ as in van, /zh/ as in measure, /ch/ as in pitch, /z/ as in closet, /ee/as in taxi. We should be done with them by the end of next week.
And then… no more formal reading lessons, except maybe as needed to reinforce one concept or another, or to point out a potentially helpful pattern that we haven’t done yet. (For example, I haven’t yet found a good time to teach the so-called "magic e" or "silent e", you know, the one that "turns cap into cape, tap into tape" — there never seemed a point when it would be more helpful than confusing — consider the words love, come, have, some, give, live, above, granite, were, and many others. Can it really be a "rule" when there are so damn many exceptions? And yet, it is a common enough pattern that he should learn it eventually.)
Nothing but making sure he spends plenty of time each day reading. And I’m so looking forward to that. Teaching reading has been interesting, if intense. Milo’s three years younger. I figure that Oscar will be just about ready to take off on his own when it’s time to start Milo on /a/ and /m/. I wonder if it will be boring the second time around?
UPDATE FOR PHONOLOGY NERDS. Jamie of Selkie points me to the Wikipedia "Vowel" article re: "long" and "short" vowels, and writes: "A phonetician calls them tense/lax vowels, and tense vowels typically last longer than lax vowels." (That’s so in some languages, including RP English, according to the "Tenseness" Wikipedia article — is it so in American English dialects?) Anyway, the article says that the terms "tense" and "lax" for this distinction don’t have any basis in reality either: "This opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments have repeatedly failed to show this."
This article indicates a preference for the terms "free vowel" and "checked vowel" — a meaningful distinction as only free vowels "may stand in a stressed open syllable with no following consonant." (No word ends in /i/ as in hit, for example.) But the "long/short" distinction doesn’t correspond exactly to "free/checked" categories: the so-called "short o" sound is free and can appear at the end of words (bra), while the rest of the "short vowel sounds" are checked. I maintain that this long/short thing doesn’t correspond to reality enough to be useful, even if it’s "traditional."
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