Reading Opens Your World
Anyone who knows me, knows I do a lot of reading. My maternal grandfather was a constant reader as was my mother. I have two main memories of my grandfather, one was him reading and smoking a pipe and the other was him tinkering in his greenhouse with plants.
I came close to not being a reader.
When I was being taught to read, schools were just starting to change over from kids learning phonics to read to kids learning sight reading. I never got sight reading.
How can you expect a child to look at words and know them because they have previously seen them? How do they grow their vocabular when they have no tools to use for pronouncing words?
I was one of the worst readers in my class at school. Then I brought home a report card with a big C for reading. My mother wasn’t happy to see a B, seeing a C, well that wasn’t pretty. Even worse, a C in reading. My mother wasn’t having any part of that.
My mother steps in
She sat me down to read to her. When I came upon the first word I didn’t know I paused waiting for her to prompt me. Instead I heard, “Sound it out”.
I had no idea what sounding it out meant. I’d never heard of such a thing. At first my mother thought I was trying to avoid doing the ‘work’ and then she…
