"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 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 and get to the end.
That really took me until then. Maybe it was almost sixth grade now that
I am thinking about it.
Anyway...it just 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 what
brought us, what was able to bridge that gap was reading out loud, and having
and having having books that were that we shared out loud.
So books on tape were really important. But also books as relationships,
because I can remember so many aspects of for example great
"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens. I loved that book so much, and,
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 I, you know, the if it was winter in Minnesota,
and the windows were leaky, and we had metal blinds and they would kind
of shake which, you know, added to the the tension of the scene.
And I remember, I remember the touch of the couch, and I remember my
cat on my lap, and I can remember so many of that sort of the
physical sensations of being present in that story.
We think about reading acquisition as you know, being able to answer
questions at the end of the passage, but that's not reading.
You know, that's not, that's not reading a book, because a book is
a relationship, and 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 with
this story, with these 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 be, to have them do in the
meantime is to have books that are read to them, either by a parent,
or by a teacher. Being... 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 to make predictions, and to
and to be wondering, and to like be thinking backwards, right?
You know that we need to 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, you know, some pretty harsh reading curricula that
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 and just refused to read at all. And and so 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 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 of have a world that he could kind
of control a little bit. When when, you know, middle school and everything
got to be kind of a lot then all of those than 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."