Our learning to read journey

This is the face of an extremely proud beginner reader!

At the beginning of the school year I asked her what her goals for kindergarten were. Her biggest goal was to learn to read. The frustration quickly set in when she found out that she wasn't going to be able to pick up a book in an afternoon and be a proficient reader within a few minutes.

There have been tears, frustration, stomping of the feet, putting herself down and nerves as the months have passed. She kept beating herself up and crying that she'd never learn to read.

I finally stopped teaching her. Every so often we'd do a few worksheets but that was mainly cementing her knowledge of the alphabet and writing letters. 

As time has gone on and she's relaxed I have noticed that she is picking up more & more.

I really began to notice a few weeks ago when I got back in the car from pumping gas & she was talking to Veronica. I realized that she was reading the instructions on the gas pump. Not perfectly, but it was a start. 

Daddy noticed when she was sitting beside him at the computer and she said "are you looking up fairy princesses?" because she read what he had typed.

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That was a long winded way to say that our reading journey has been slow and full of bumps in the road. Once I let go of the idea that she "should" be reading now, I read a few articles about how we shouldn't push kindergarteners to read, we need to follow their lead, and remembered my own reading lessons, I relaxed. 

She is doing fine. I read to her many times a day. She is practicing. We both have relaxed now that I've taken all outside pressure and let it go in one ear and out the other.

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Yesterday was Dr. Seuss' birthday and I read a biography of him during morning basket time. She was enthralled that it was a true story about a real person & she loved hearing about the author who wrote The Cat in the Hat, that Dr. Seuss followed his own creative dream to become a cartoonist & that he really wanted to help kids just like her learn to read.

After morning basket time we moved to table work where I had a worksheet of sight words for her to cut out & then match with their rhyming partner. I originally had planned on doing it alongside her but the toddler was being particularly toddlerish and needed me more than usual.

I half occupied Veronica & half listened to Marie-Therese and was blown away that she took the time to sound the words out, many didn't take time at all, and that she only needed help on one or two. The rhyming part she had down pat (I'm attributing that to our weekly poetry readings).

When she was done she jumped up & down and was so excited that "I can read! I can read! I don't need your help all the time!"

I later asked her to read to me but she said she was too nervous & I make her make mistakes and she would rather not. That is totally fine. We will keep practicing here and there and I will step back, allowing her the freedom to learn the way she needs. Obviously something is going right, because she really is starting to pick it up!