My Mom Taught Me

I have pleasant memories of my mom teaching me phonics. Unbeknownst to my mom at the time, because I never told her until I was an adult, I had been terrified of my kindergarten teacher because she yelled constantly. So no wonder I had not learned how to read at all in kindergarten.

My mom used yellow sheets of lined paper upon which she wrote words like ball, cat and dog down on the paper and showed me how to read each one. She was successful in teaching me and I went on to first grade. I wished I could remember how my reading instruction went from there, but I do remember my teacher in 1st or 2nd grade writing the word "enough" on the board and asking anyone if they knew the word. I remember being proud of myself because I was the only one who raised a hand and knew the word. I don't remember how I knew that word, but I went on to read well in advance of my grade level.

I was the oldest of 5 children, and in my adolescence, I taught the youngest 3 children how to use phonics to read. My mom even took me to the library so I could help my brothers and sisters pick out books. We would play school and I would teach and they would learn. I now know from my current research that I had taught them some of the vowel combinations, such as ow, oo, er, or and ar, but I had not taught all the other sounds that are possible. Each of them knew basic phonics reading when they went to school. The school must have continued to teach phonics, because all went on to be good readers, and one is a postdoctoral fellow in a specialized science, and at least two remember being taught phonics.

Anyway, I mention all of this because when it came to my daughter I wanted her to learn to read before she went to school. At first, she did not want to learn from her mom. So I purchased some DVDs for her to watch. That got her interested and she started to ask me how to spell words and she started to spell words herself. She could read some 3 and 4 letter words, but I could not yet get her to read a book with me. But I was patient and did not push. Given that she had the basics of reading, I expected that she would do well with reading in school when someone other than her mom would be teaching her. And, I expected that the school would use phonics to pick up where I left off. But that just didn't happen. And, now I'm wondering just how long I will be teaching her in order to fill in the gaping gaps in her education at school. I suspect at this moment that it will be through her all her public school years.