Like I Have Time For This?

I think we all need to seriously acknowledge how hard our younger children work at learning to read. Seriously. Whether your kid is “normal” or “gifted” or “dyslexic” or just plain old “regular”, learning to read is intense. And they work damn hard at it, and we should acknowledge that. Honor it.

We work on primer for about 15 to 20 minutes a day, 3 or 4 days a week. Any more than that, and my kindergartener just folds herself up and disappears on me. And because I kinda like having her around, in spite of the GENERAL INSANITY that she brings to our days, I don’t like it when she folds up and disappears. So we keep primer lessons as brief as possible. And if I can get her laughing by the end of the page, so much the better.

We have reached that delicate place in her reading lessons, where it seems that the BREAKTHROUGH is imminent: that the day will come soon when she simply picks up a book and sits down to read it without realizing that she’s done it. She’s already begun reading store signs and road signs without thinking about it. And whatever I give her to read to me, she can do it. Yet if asked, she tells people that she doesn’t know how to read yet. She’s in THAT place. That tricky place.

And I remember when my 8-year-old was there in that place. How stormy it was. How intense and BIG it all was for her. And she remembers too. I know she does. Because already a few times, when I’m sitting on the couch working with my 5-year-old on something tricky, and I pull out a joke or a game from my magic bag, my older daughter whips around in her chair, her math sheet forgotten in the excitement of realizing that her sister is learning THAT COOL THING!!! She grins at us, and sometimes gets up to join in the word game, or even in rare moments accidentally shouts the answer to something, and then we all laugh together, and I admonish her to go on back to her math, to let her sister try.

And then, on other days, when no matter what I pull out from my bag of tricks, nothing works, and my 5-year-old grouses and grumbles and fidgets until I find a quick exit to the lesson no matter where we’re at and let her go play, my 8-year-old just finishes her math and finds something to do without any comment. She understands how hard it is. And she also knows that the payoff is coming. But like me, she knows better than to try to explain that to her sister. Some things — things like wandering through the house reading a book and eating an apple at the same time — are inexplicable. But worth the wait.

Today, we reached the point in primer when it was time to put the word “have” into word jail for being a rule breaker. I wrote the word “have” on the board and drew a bunch of bars over it and a little lock and key, and a sad face around the silent ‘e’ because he’d been defeated by the dastardly “have”. And my 5-year-old was giggling herself into a general uproar and my 8-year-old was cheering “WORD JAIL! WORD JAIL! WORD JAIL!” and all was well in our little world.

It’s not a whole lot a time we spend on this stuff, but it’s quite tiring all the same. She’s got other work to do, in other subjects, but none of them are required the way primer is required, and I’m constantly glad that she’s doing this hard work here at home, where the moment I sense she’s Had Enough Of It For The Day, I can simply release her, cancel the rest of her subjects and let her go wherever it is she needs to go to get it out of her system. To wait for the BREAKTHROUGH that she doesn’t even realize is coming.

A year or so from now she’ll be wandering into the kitchen with a copy of Black Beauty to find a piece of cheese or an apple in the fridge. She’ll slog back to the couch with her snack and dig into it and bend her head into all those words — the words she won’t even remember struggling over this year — and when I tell her it’s time to put the book away, she’ll groan and be all irritated with me.

And I will have taught her how to read.