Rose is learning to read. It’s really happening. At the beginning of the year, we had the heavy aspiration of B, followed by O, O, O, O and then back to B. Each one a separate entity. I kept picturing train cars without their couplings or a stretched out accordion that never got squeezed back together.

But at Sunday School this week she read the bold print, “We love our God with all” (the rest of the sentence a mystery to her. I’m going with the guess “our hearts.”) When she went to do the color-by-numbers game, she could read every color. And she’s up to reading level D in the take-home books with sentences like “Zebras have patterns. Snakes have patterns. Bob and Stan jump in the pond.”

As someone who took a graduate course in teaching reading to adults and then tried to do it for several years, I’m fascinated by all the techniques that are making this happen.

Read to her

Twenty minutes a day. Read to your bunny, and she will be well adjusted, off drugs, smart. Reading to your child has been set up as the answer to all our societal ills, and oh yeah, she’ll learn to read. I probably believe most of the good press about reading, and I actually believe you don’t really need any other tricks to learn how to do it yourself. If someone reads to you enough, eventually, you will learn to read. (Now, I’ve got to find the studies to prove this.)

Practice going left to right

It never occurred to me that you’d have to train yourself to stay in your own lane and look left at the curb, but if that adult who’s been reading to you hasn’t shown you how the words flow, why wouldn’t you read upside down and backwards? Rose still looks at the digital clock and says, “It’s 9:23.” When it is, in fact, 3:29.

So, in her school they pour water into cups or line up plastic bears moving left to right.

Learn rules

This is one of the many places I got into trouble as a reading teacher. English has so many rules and so many exceptions to the rules that my students and I just wanted to throw our hands in the air. And reading has a momentum like riding on a bike. If you spend all your time figuring out which rule goes here, you fall off the bike and never figure out the meaning of the sentence.

But it seems to work differently with little kids. At least learning the rules seems to be working for Rose. She’s got the short vowel sounds down. She knows an “e” at the end of a short word makes the vowel sound long—hike, bike, Mike. She knows two o’s make a long u like “boo!” Except when they don’t like book, look, cook.

Drill

She’s learning the rules because they drill them day in and day out. Every day after morning recess they chant the alphabet “alligator, alligator, a, a, a; baby bird, baby bird, b, b, b.” This would drive me nuts, but she’s loving it. They also drill with flashcards, worksheets, classroom pals, older buddies, grown-up volunteers. Anytime, day or night, it’s “cod, cap, hit, win, zip, zip, zip.”

Memorize

They get around the you-can’t-sound-them-all-out problem by straight out memorizing. Rose had “The End” down the first week. You’ve heard me speak of all the geometry terms she recognizes. I mean, please, she’s not actually sounding out “quatrefoil.” It’s just useful to come to a word and know it’s “orange” without having to think.

Read all over the place

This is the one that would have made such a huge difference in my students’ lives. Most of them only read English while sitting in my classroom and that went for the native speakers too. Books, magazines, notes home, labels on cupboards, labels on fish—the kindergarteners read everywhere. Yesterday, Rose noticed that the lid to the yogurt carton said, “gluten-free.”

Read about things she knows

When I first heard the research on this, I kind of thought it was cheating—reading comprehension goes up when you read about subjects you already know. But now I believe it’s real reading. If you already know about diggers, you can draw on all those other reading skills—prediction, inference, contextual clues, image making, comprehension checking—to aid your decoding. Good readers do this all the time. Why shouldn’t beginning readers get a chance to build on what they know? That’s why my students read about sex, drugs, and basketball. (The day they acted out Edward Hirsch’s poem Fast Break was just stunning.) That’s why Rose reads about babies, jump rope, and trips to the dentist.

Use picture cues

It’s the same idea, right? Rose isn’t actually sounding out the word “piano.” She’s looking at the picture, seeing the word starts with a “p” and making an educated guess. Sometimes I feel like she’s not really reading when the pictures are so obviously telling her “Sam sat on the black cat,” but it’s pre-reading for sure. It’s building her store of recognized words and her confidence.

Stay in the “just right” zone

For her read-to-herself books, the rule is 0 words you don’t know—too easy; more than 5 too hard; 2-3, just right. And they aren’t supposed to sound out the words they don’t know; the parents just hand them over. It makes total sense for the keep-the-bicycle-moving part of reading and for self-confidence. Rose started with no word picture books and now she’s at level D.

When first I entered the reading wars, the battle was between Whole Language--just get read to and you will absorb all you need, this way is more authentic, natural, and humane and Phonics—direct instruction in pronunciation, blending, dipthongs, and rules, follow the carefully proscribed system and you will make it home safely, this way is more egalitarian ‘cause not everybody has a closet full of A,B,C puzzles. I’m sure the battle is still raging out there in theory land, but in the meantime, it seems that Rose is getting the best of both worlds.

And, even more importantly, she loves to read. She loves it more every day.