Patches is the only person in our house who can’t read. He feels this distinction strongly and has been trying to work with letters and writing for months. I saw him wanting to read and write, but I was too busy to give him more than cursory help. Yesterday and today I sat down with him and we started working on reading. It made him so happy.
I have piles of early reading materials. I collected it all when I was working to teach Link to read. Reading did not come easily to Link. He needed lots of practice at very easy levels, but the stories were so simple that they quickly bored him. It was a very different experience teaching reading to Patches. With Link I cut each lesson in half because it was too much for him to take at once. With Patches I’m actually skipping material because I can tell that he’s already mastered it and doesn’t need to practice more.
I wore out on reading before Patches did. He sat down with a book and carefully learned all the words in it so that he could read it himself. But he wasn’t just memorizing, he was paying attention to each written word and matching it to a spoken word. This kid is going to be reading in no time at all if I just keep making time to work with him. I intend to keep making the time. This is what Patches needs right now.
Wow. Alex and I have started on reading this week, too, but since he’s the oldest kid he doesn’t feel much enthusiasm for it at all. There are vague hints and future enthusiasm once he figures out exactly what it’s all good for, though, so we’ll keep at our little two-minutes-a-day program.
We got your Thank You note today. Now I don’t feel quite so bad for not getting the Lemmings sent out as soon as we bought it. I think it was 6 weeks or so before I got Alaric to get it in the mail.
I’m glad you and yours are enjoying it.
I wish I could get Wen interested in in learning to read. She’d much rather have one of us sit and read to her though. I wonder if she’ll be like I was and refuse to read until the last quarter of first grade. I really really bothered Mrs Hassell with that. My sisters had learn to read quite quickly and she knew that I should be reading too but was refusing. I think what got me reading was that she finally asked me to learn to read, so I did, then I “borrowed” my sister’s sixth grade reading book while suffering from chicken pox and started reading everything I could get my hands on. But my older children have all had different teachers and their schools are no where near as small as the school I went to.
Entertainingly, my son learned to read later than we expected, because he was memorising the books after as little as one reading at bedtime.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. *grin* But all children vary, so what the hey. I try to go with the flow…