I was a delayed reader. And it’s hard for me to say exactly what made me become a reader. I know that it really wasn’t until really the end of fifth grade that I was reading with such fluency that I could read a whole novel and understand it and enjoy it and get to the end. It really took me until then, maybe it was almost sixth grade actually now that I’m thinking about it.
Anyway, it didn’t come naturally to me.
My youngest child, my son, was also a delayed and reluctant reader. And for my son and for me what brought us, what was able to bridge that gap was reading out loud and having books that we shared out loud. So books on tape were really important. But also books as relationships, because I can remember so many aspects, for example, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, I loved that book so much.
But every, every moment of that book when I think of it, I hear my dad’s voice reading it, right? And I remember being on that couch and I remember, it was winter in Minnesota and the windows were leaky and we had metal blinds and they would kind of shake, which added to the tension of the scene. And I remember the touch of the couch and I remember my cat on my lap and I can remember so many of the, sort of the physical sensations of being present in that story.
We think about reading acquisition as being able to answer questions at the end of the passage, but that’s not reading. That’s not reading a book, because a book is a relationship that when we read a book we are doing the work of building the story but we are also opening our hearts and our minds to the experience of the characters. And so we are putting ourselves in relationship with this story, with these characters, with this world.
And so I think that for a kid who is really struggling with reading I think that being … one of the things to have them do in the meantime is to have books that are read to them, either by a parent or by a teacher or to be able to have that experience of a story being shared, because then they are developing all of those great cognitive skills that we need to have in place in order to be good readers, to foreshadow and make predictions and to be wondering and to like be thinking backwards, right, you know, that we need be kind of unstuck in time when we are reading a book, right?
But then also what they also will maintain is that closeness and that intimacy with a book. My son partially because of some pretty harsh reading curricula that was introduced in his school became convinced that he was too dumb to read, which basically broke my heart into a thousand pieces and just refused to read at all.
And sort of his only interaction with books was the books that we shared. And we read every single night. And it was this, it is the time that I treasured and that I still treasure. And when he was ready, when he found the books that spoke to him, when he was able to turn to books as a way of being able to have a world that he could kind of control a little bit, when middle school and everything else got to be kind of a lot, then all of those, then that closeness and the relationship and that knowledge of the relationship was in place. I am so glad that that is what my parents did with me and I’m so glad that that’s what I did with my son.