My Boys Can Read

With all the fooferah in the news about boys and their inability to read and how they are always years behind the girls and we must change our teaching methods and what about using comic books to teach them or even better put all the boys in separate boys schools, Society had me convinced it would be a miracle if my kids knew their ABCs by the age of 10.

Of course none of this changed my approach to raising them in their early years. I had also heard some research that said children who received no teaching prior to school reached the same academic level by age 7 as those who did receive intensive teachings in daycare and preschool. Me and my boys were having too much fun out in the mud during the first 4 years of their lives for things like letters and numbers to get in the way.

When I registered the first one for Junior Kindergarten, a package arrived in the mail 2 weeks before school was to start. It detailed expectations for the child at the beginning of the year along with goals they would hopefully attain by the end. The child was expected to know their name, ABCs, count to 20, know basic shapes, colours, body parts, print, the list went on and on. 

I hauled him inside. "What's your name?" I said. "I'm STUPID!" he said and fell over laughing. I never called him by his first name and he knew 'stupid' was a bad word so of course this was hysterical to him. 

I was in big trouble. My kid was going to fail Kindergarten. 

For the next 2 weeks we all sang the alphabet song and when we weren't singing we were counting. I called him by his first name constantly and he constantly thought I was mad at him. We practiced our address, colours, printing, we crammed for JK. By the beginning of school he wasn't exactly up to speed but he wasn't a blank slate either.

During the first 2 months of JK the teacher thought my son was deaf. He didn't talk and he didn't respond to her. She told me later if he hadn't improved by December she would have talked to me about him but she knew he'd never been in day care and those kids tend to take longer to warm up to the classroom setting she said. 

JK was 2 days a week. The ABC books came home and he learned his letters. Books with sentences came home and he read the sentences. We'd sit together for reading time, he'd sound out the words following my finger where I pointed to only those letters that made a sound. After he read, I would have him practice his printing by writing out some sentences. By the end of JK, he was reading at the level where they were expected to be at the end of Grade 1. By the end of Senior Kindergarten, he was reading at a mid-Grade 2 level.

I now realize that my first boy's ability to learn to read so quickly was a little unusual. But I also think the method I used helped immensely. English is a tricky language and many words rely on sight recognition. When your child is reading to you,

• point only to the letters that make a sound. Explaining rules of grammar to a 5 year old is too overwhelming, assuming you remember the rules yourself. At this age they need to practice recognizing the same word on many pages.  
• when they have finished reading, have them print out some (or all) of what they have read. Printing reinforces their reading and when they see the same words over and over again (and, the, went, came, etc.) they quickly learn to spell them without looking and read them without sounding them out. Result; their reading becomes more fluent.

With a little one-on-one your boys too can surpass Society's expectations.