more thoughts about kids learning to read

When Kevin brought home his first "book in a bag" in Kindergarten, I was horrified. I had worked for months trying to teach him how to sound out words using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (although easy was not how I would have described the experience) and now it looked like they had ruined all my hard work. He was reading books with text like, "The dog. The horse. The pig. The cow. The farm." All they had to do was recognize the sight word (in this case, "the") and guess the other word using the picture.

Over the course of the year reading the books in a bag was in general pretty frustrating because the books weren't very interesting and sometimes the guessing game for figuring out unknown words was complicated. I would say the kids mostly worked on learning sight words and recognizing endings like -er, -ed, and -ing. Towards the end there was more of an expectation to sound out words and they learned how to sound out words with "super e" at the end of words (i.e. like, made, take, etc.).

Over the summer we discovered Piggy and Gerald and Kevin's reading really improved because we had books that were actually fun to read. We also started having him read a verse from the Book of Mormon every day, which was helpful because there's a lot of repetition, so he learned more words. In first grade he's learned a lot more rules about phonetics and his skills have improved enough that he can read more interesting books. He can read pretty much any of the I Can Read It Myself books independently as well as Splat the Cat and Fly Guy. Recently we've been reading Henry and Mudge books and those seem to be at about the right level for him. He can also read The Magic Tree House with help, and I think once he can get to the point where he can read those and The Boxcar Children independently his world will be open to a much broader selection of books.

Over time I've stopped feeling upset about the way they taught reading in kindergarten. Teaching Kevin to read words phonetically was like beating my head against the wall, but once Kevin had mastered enough sight words he was a lot more willing to try sounding out words because knowing enough sight words meant he didn't have to sound out every single word, so he didn't get burned out as fast and he felt a lot more confident. I do wish they had worked on reading phonetically a little earlier on, but in the end I think starting with sight words was a good approach for Kevin.

I think one of the hardest things is that for kindergarteners who are just starting to learn to read there aren't a lot of fun books at their level. I realize that it's hard to write a fun book when you're limited to a handful of sight words and phonetic words. Or maybe there actually are books like that out there, but our school is making do with the same books that they've been using for a long time because there's not money to invest in new ones. I spent a lot of time looking through the Easy Reader section at the public library and until this past fall I had a hard time finding books that were enjoyable and at his level. I think my advice to parents of kindergarteners would be to be hang in there for that first year because it gets a lot better once they have enough reading skills.