How My Children Learned to Read
by Pam Sorooshian
Do you remember how much fun it was when your child was learning to talk? How each word was just adorable? How you’d strain your imagination, at first, to figure out what the sounds he was making might mean? How he slowly became easier and easier to understand? How he surprised you sometimes when he popped out with a word you didn’t know he knew? How he just “all on his own” started putting the words together and how they slowly turned into phrases and then sentences? Do you remember how he made mistakes by putting words together in ways that made sense logically, but just weren’t the way we speak the language? Did he make up words? Did he mispronounce them? Wasn’t it amazingly wonderfully satisfying to watch the slow, but inevitable, progress he made in speaking? Think for a minute about what your role was in that development.
I remember my oldest daughter, hearing a knock on the front door, standing behind it and shouting, “Whobody is there?” I remember the first two words she put together were “Hi there,” which she often shouted while waving at people as we cruised the aisles in the grocery store. Everyone around her responded with hugs and smiles and nods of encouragement and, especially, we responded by talking to her a lot and by listening to her very very carefully.
Learning to read can be just as joy-filled as learning to talk was.
