Anya and Reading

Note: This is a dad’s perspective only post.  I read Anya to sleep pretty much every night that I’m home. It’s one of my very favorite things to do, so I get a fair amount of reading time with the kidlet. Mom generally reads to Anya when I’m not around (or so she would have me believe!) but since I’m not there, I can’t speak to mom’s experience with Anya and reading. 

Here is dad’s assessment of Anya’s reading around 4 1/2 year old.

Anya reads better than her father spells, but since that is a pretty base achievement, let me provide some details.

She’s known her alphabet for some time,  she also knows all the sounds that the letters make (there might be one or two like Q that she’s not real clear on, but q’s pretty silly so who cares).  She often gets b d and p confused as well as u and n, but then again so do I.

At this point she can sound out simple words that don’t have any tricks in them.  No long vowel sounds for instance, where you say the first vowel’s name and the second vowel is silent, or ph = f or schwas.  You know, all those weird English spelling rules that you probably don’t even think about but the poor spellers among you still struggle with.

She does know that “oo” makes an u sound (she learned that one from “z-o-o”), so she was able to sound out the word “balloon” a few days back. 

Tonight she and I read through a few early reading books.  My technique is to read along and, when I come upon an easy word, I’ll stop and point at it.  She’ll sound it out, say the word, and I’ll keep going.  If it’s a hard word but I think she can get it, I’ll say, “oooh, this one’s a really tough one, but I bet you can figure it out!”  Or if she's in a more contrary mood, I'll say, "Man I bet you can't get this one, since you can't read."  Sometime there will be a repeating word that I’ll point too and she’ll yell it out when it comes by.  She has even read a sentence or two like “Bob got a bat” and the like.

Here are an assortment of words she read by herself tonight:

Scat, cat, small, dog, bird, bus, duck, frog, goose, dark, owl, bat, log, skunk, boy, pillbug, class, helmet, truck, up, stop, drop, roll, zoom. 

Sometimes she’s really into it, like tonight, other nights she doesn’t want to even try and screams, “I can’t do it!” and cries without even trying the first letter, so I try to get her to sound the word out slowly.  Once that’s accomplished I’ll generally stop trying to get her to read for the night. (She really needs to figure out that saying, “I can’t do it” doesn’t work well with me.)

At any rate, I remember struggling with “See Bob Run” in 1^st grade (thank you mom for your patience), so I’m very proud and impressed with Anya’s skills.