kiwords

Just last week sometime I was leaving unsolicited advice in the comment section of a blog. The writer of the blog talked about how her six year old son was suddenly afraid to read, and I responded by saying that I'd taught three boys to read, and they all did the same thing. They start out thrilled with the magic of phonics, of A says aaahhhh, and B says buh, and suddenly you can put together three letters-that-make-sounds, and you have a WORD! The first word all three boys read was RAN, and they carried it around on a 3X5 card, reading it for people and beaming.

But then they cross a line, and they're able to learn more than they're able to process, and the printed word becomes threatening and awful and MAKE IT GO AWAY. We spend a year or so dancing gingerly around the concept of reading, with me reading to them a lot, them looking at books with lots of pictures and small amounts of non-threatening text. Slowly but surely they build skills and then one day, like magic, they suddenly become readers. Some book catches their eye, and they pick it up...and read.

You can always tell if you catch them reading as they walk up or down stairs. That's a dead giveaway. The line has been crossed, and will never be un-crossed. It's like giving birth all over again. Look, honey, it's a READER!

What I DIDN'T say in my long, unsolicited advice comment was that wee Raphael had yet to cross that line. It happens right about age 7, I said, but that's a waaaay oversimplification. Tre got there right around his seventh birthday, but I swear Tre read the developmental milestone list in utero and committed it to memory. Max didn't get there until almost NINE years old, largely because he - ahem- needed reading glasses apparently. And he had tracking issues. Until those things were ironed out, letters were way too fiddly and unreliable for him to establish a relationship with them. And wee Raphi? Well, things tend to come easily for him. And if they don't? He rejects them with extreme prejudice. It's a battle I fight with him all the time. I swear his natural ability is going to end up being his greatest weakness if he doesn't get over it.

So here he is, three months from turning eight, and still not much of a reader.

Until today.

I caught him walking up the stairs, nose stuck deep in the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

"Close the book when you're on the stairs," I said.

"Mmm-hmm," he answered, TOTALLY not listening to me.

One day he was someone who could decode words, but didn't care to all that much. Today he's a reader.

An everyday miracle, perhaps. But a miracle nonetheless.