Learning to Read

I had been wondering how reading happens. It is difficult to "see" how someone learns to read, to really see the process that is going on inside. A while back I decided to ask Karen how she thought she learned to read. Here is how the conversation went.

I (Mom) ask Karen, “How did you learn how to read?”

Karen: “I don’t know.”

Mom: “Can you remember when you couldn’t read, and then you could? Remember when you used to read the BOB books?”

Karen: “Zoophonics helped”

We talked a little about my memory of when Karen read her first Bob book by herself. She doesn’t seem to remember it, but I told her how excited she was bouncing on the bed “I can read!”

Mom: “But then you stopped reading for me. Remember when we used to take turns reading? I read some of the page, you read some of the page?”

Karen: “Oh yeah, the easy reader chapter books. I like books with bigger words. I like you to read Nancy Drew to me because of words like Pierrot.” [Nancy Drew and friends find a life-size Pierrot puppet in The Clue of the Dancing Puppet…]

Mom: “So how do you think you learned to read after we stopped doing Bob books and you stopped reading out loud to me?” (Karen was never fond of the take-turns-reading-aloud thing.)

Karen “I taught myself. It’s like the world is full of words and there are words all around me all day and every day. And the words are like… cookies and I slowly eat them up day by day.”
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