Learning to read

Reading is something very close to my heart. And as a natural progression, when Yash was just a few months old, I had started reading to him. I remember the first book that I read to him was 'Dora the Explorer, Bubba Bugga Baby'(Don't ask me why!!) I know the lines in that book better than the lines on the back of my hand, even today! Maybe it was the rhythm, or maybe just the feeling of being read to, whatever it was, Yash started showing a reaction to it. He would gurgle and 'hmmm' with each line, egging me to go on if I stopped.
That was all the encouragement I needed. I went out and bought a host of other books. But for some reason, he wanted Dora. His affection was shared by another book by the time he was 6 months old. It was a bath-time squeeze and splash book. He enjoyed it for all the different ways he could handle it, exploring the sounds it made when we squeezed it, and definitely exploring it with his mouth :) This book became the bait many times, to lure him into a crawling position from sitting.
At about 1 year, Yash enjoyed the lift-the -flap Winne The Pooh book 'Walk in the woods'. He would be very happy to lift the flap and see an animal hiding behind and we would be rewarded with a broad toothy grin. It was around this time that he also loved to flip through his 'Baby's First Picture Book'. With over 1000 pictures and words, Yash would want one of us to sit with him and read out the words as we pointed at the pictures. Very soon, the role was reversed where we would only read the word and Yash started pointing to the pictures. Like all parents, we believed that we had a genius on our hands ;) Vickram is a very hands-on dad and loved to read to Yash too. He would spend hours with Yash on this book.
Being an educationist, it gave me joy that my child was picking up an interest in books and I wanted to help that habit as much as I could. Another of our favorite (note that it was OUR fav) is the 'Time For Bed' by Mem Fox. A lovely book for bedtime. You can look it up here. The book is absolutely soothing and is wonderful even in the illustrations.
He would often come with his favorite book, thrust it in either me or my husband's hands and settle into our lap for a story :)

A few more favorites include Eric Carle's 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar', 'Lion King', and many more.

As Yash grew into his two's, his interest started waning from books and he was more inclined toward other toys and more active play. I realized that, at that point, Yash had become independent with his new found freedom to walk, run and jump as he pleased. This obviously meant that he wanted to spend all his time exploring his new skill. He would occasionally be willing to listen to some audio books, probably for the novelty.
At this juncture, two things were running on my mind - 1. Early literacy meant better performance in almost anything and hence I should push him to read more. 2. I should not let my learning style cramp his and hence should allow him to choose his own path. These conflicting thoughts led me to just let it be and become an observer, following his interests carefully, ready to step in if he needed my help.
My observations (being an educator, what do you expect), led me to understand that my son had a combination of two styles of learning - Auditory, because he love to listen to the hazaar stories his dad would bestow upon him; Visual, because he loved looking at the pictures, videos and other gadgets.
At three years of age, Yash got the gift of an ipod touch. The children of today are truly 'technology natives' and it seemed to us that he was able to navigate around it almost with zero effort. This opened him up to the world of story apps, He would listen and look at many stories being narrated. Though he spent a considerable amount of time playing too, we were quite happy with his usage of the gadget. The ipod was replaced by an ipad and his exploration continued. There is a lot of educational content available on these platforms and that would become the topic for another blog another day!
We had been playing games to bring about phonemic awareness. Our favorite game while travelling in the car was word building and the likes. Games of recognizing and finding the letter in the newspaper, on the display boards, etc. also continued. At school, he was used to the Glenn Doman reading technique of sight words. At about 4 years of age, Yash started showing signs of early reading skills. He started to recognize few words. We were delighted and showed it, quite vehemently too! This served to motivate him further. He would be able to read three and four letter words by 4 years.

He is 5yrs, 5 months old now and his reading is just amazing. Each time he picks up a book and reads by himself now, tears just well up in my eyes. He is able to read voraciously. He makes mistakes, but that is part of learning. The part to marvel about is that he knows when his reading is amiss and quickly tries to correct himself.

In retrospect, there was no structured pre-reading skills that we worked on. We moved forward keeping his pace and interest in mind. I have never been much of a fan of phonics for reading and did not try much of it with Yash. His reading is more intuitive. He knows how sentences should be and guesses his way into a paragraph. Many times he assumes the word, he sometimes gets it wrong.

In my opinion, phonics causes children to over-analyze and hence disrupts the process of reading. There are many rules that come into play while using phonics such as awareness about vowels, their usage, syllables with multiple sounds, etc. This interferes with the natural flow of reading. We all learn our mother tongue without having formal training or the need to learn grammar. Similarly, reading happens as a natural progression from recognition of individual letters to groups of letters. Thus, my preferred choice of pre-reading activities rely heavily on sight word reading.
You can read up more about this technique here.

We have not been as lucky with writing..... Will keep you posted on the challenges of learning to write!

Happy Reading You All!