Teaching kids to read
No, reading is not a natural thing
Lately, my wife and I have been teaching our three-year old grandson the basic skills that will eventually turn into reading. He is a great talker with an impressive vocabulary. He knows his alphabet well and the sounds the letters make. And he has good hand eye coordination, exemplified, at least in part, by his ability to skip so well.
For the longest time, I didn’t know why hand-eye coordination mattered in learning to read. Then my mother-in-law, a retired teacher, explained to me that the coordination is required to move the eyes across the page. Remember, how words are written across the page is a social construct — from right-to-left, then top to bottom is not how everybody does it. Consider the Japanese. As a culture, that is simply how we decided to do it.
Anyway, these skills he already has should stand him in good stead to learn to read. Considering that my wife and I already taught both our children to read should give us a head start. Right?
Well, in a way, yes. But I can say for certain that among our two children and our grandson, each has taken to reading differently. We may know the methods to teach reading, by helping him learn his phonics, but each has succeeded in some ways and struggled in others, and their ways are unique to each child.
