Teaching My Daughters to Read. Part I: Context

Blast from the Past: This blog entry was first issued on June 30, 2014 and was reissued on March 28, 2020. As I re-introduce this piece, we are sheltering in place as is so much of the world. That means schools are closed in many places and teachers and parents are concerned about what is being lost from children’s education. As with many of you, I’ve been trying to help protect children’s learning during these fraught times. Which brings us to today’s blog entry, this one about how I taught my own children to read at home. This blog was published in four parts and the other three are now linked at the bottom of the first. Perhaps there will be something in these that will be useful to families at this challenging time. Be safe.

Shanahan’s Response: Part I

Yes, we taught both of our girls to read at home before they started school. I’d be happy to tell you how, but that will have to spread out across a few entries to do the topic justice.

Anyone who has had one child is usually a deep believer in the power of DNA; anyone with two realizes that couldn’t be the explanation. Children can be pretty different, and my daughters definitely were not cut from the same cloth. Some of what we did with them was the same, and some of our efforts differed because of their differences.

For instance, language came much easier to my oldest (E), while my youngest (M) was a late talker (or, perhaps, more accurately, her development was slowed by having an older sibling who spoke for her — not surprisingly, her spokesperson eventually became a lawyer). When M was three, we took her to the neighborhood elementary school to get speech services, focused on pronunciations and general vocabulary.

Let’s start with context. Most kids don’t “learn to read” just from being in a literate environment; teaching is needed, too. But that doesn’t mean that context does not matter so let me describe that. There were lots of opportunities for our kids to find out about literacy and language and to develop some motivation for it.

Both girls were read to a lot, though E received more of this — mainly because she was more attentive and interested from an early age. Shared reading started within hours of birth for both, and they were exposed to typical picture books (usually read by their mother) and advanced chapter books (my contribution). There was no set schedule for this reading, but it typically took place several times per week throughout their childhoods, including when they were learning to read from more explicit lessons.

E stayed interested in my book sharing once she was a toddler, so reading Charlotte’s Web or Grimm’s Fairy Tales to her was a joyful duty. M, once mobile, made it clear that having her father read to her was something to avoid.

This will sound horrible, but I’d have to “capture” her — that is, I’d grab her up in my arms for reading — initially for very brief periods (often fewer than 15 seconds at a time). She’d wiggle, wrestle, and squirm away, giggling all the way, but resistant to the book sharing.

Over time, she grew less resistant and could sit longer and longer; it was never unpleasant, but at first it was unusually brief and was not something to which she submitted willingly. (Lest this description sound too negative, I would point out that M. and I continued to read together until she was a freshman in high school — and those exchanges and the books themselves are something that we are quite both sentimental about today).

Each girl owned their own little library and books were often given as presents to them. They also had magazine subscriptions, too, and the public library was close. Rarely did a week go by that they didn’t bring home an armful of books.

The books that my wife read to them tended to be these library books (picture books for the most part) and from the girl’s own libraries, while the books that I read tended to be in our library (or they were classic books with which they had been gifted).

It can take a long time to read books like The Yearling, Gulliver’s Travels, The Hobbit, or the Odyssey. Given that, I often tried to follow the completion of these books up with some fun activity. Sometimes we would rent a videotape of the book and pop some corn and make an evening of it. A couple times we even built vacations around particular books (Tom Sawyer led to a visit to Hannibal, Missouri, and Misty of Chincoteague had us meeting the island ponies in Virginia).

The TV was often on in our house and they would watch Sesame Street often (and there are some reading and language lessons there). Later they became big fans of Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables (we read a lot of those books, too).

Lots of toys in the household had literacy or language themes, too, including alphabet blocks, early electronic toys that taught about flags, musical instruments, and flags. And, they definitely saw their parents reading and writing both for pleasure and work.

Not only did we read to the kids a lot (from the first day), but we spoke to them a lot, too. Reading is a language activity and our children had lots of opportunity to hear language, to engage in language — including songs, nursery rhymes, and language games. For example, we used to play Game of Fives. I’d name a category and the kids would try to come up with five examples (5 toys, 5 kinds of jewelry, 5 family members, 5 colors — and later 5 lakes, 5 states, 5 shapes, etc.).

As, I said, context alone is usually insufficient to cause someone to be a reader, but it does carry lessons, opportunities to learn, and motivation. My daughters were surrounded by literacy and language and this likely played an important role in the eventual success of the lessons that we provided to them.

See the next three posts here:

• Teaching My Daughters to Read. Part II: Print Awareness
• Teaching My Daughters to Read. Part III: Phonics
• Teaching My Daughters to Read. Part IV: Success

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