I think one of my favorite things I’ve experienced as a human being is watching my daughter learn to read. She learned to read near the end of kindergarten, and at the beginning of first grade.
I was always present as my daughter was going through this process of learning to read. At first, I was holding up flash cards. Pre-pandemic I was probably going to be traveling all the time, right? But now I’m home, and I’m holding up flash cards and watching her sound out very slowly the word, cat. You know, c-a-t, cat. And she’d get so excited. Meanwhile I was always reading to her. And she loved, she’s always loved story, and loves that I’m reading to her from novels.
I remember I read to her The One and Only Ivan and she just was totally locked in and asking questions. And this was during the pandemic. Then she discovered graphic novels. And I was reading those to her and she loved that she could kind of like what we would do with picture books, she’d look at the pictures while I read the text and she was getting the story on two layers.
And then I started catching her sneaking off with those books and just looking at the pictures on her own. And then fast forward a couple months and I was watching her just read some of the dialogue. Not the narrative, but just a little bit of the dialogue and she’d laugh. And I was like, “Oh, she gets it enough because we’ve read it together, that she can laugh at the joke.”
And then slowly but surely she began reading every part of the book on her own. And that’s why I value graphic novels as a literacy tool, as well as just a great vehicle for story, so much. You know, her vehicle was the Dog Man books and I watched her learn to read.
Fast forward to today and my daughter is reading book after book after book. And it’s just amazing to watch her now have ownership of a story. I still read to her all the time, because I want to be a part of this too. And she won’t read the books we’re reading together on her own. She puts them aside, and that’s her, she’s being loyal to our little collaboration. But she’s reading all these other books at the same time. And it’s just, what a gift to watch your child learn to read.
