I started showing word cards to my older son when he was about 6 months. He wasn’t really interested. So, I came up with a thousands of ways to get his attention: we were vacuum cleaning the words, wiping it, jumping over them, doing forward rolls, watching them in the car, hanging in the hallway (see more at Alternative Ways of Showing Cards to An Active Child)… With my first one I was freaking out all the time: “Is it working?”, “Is he learning?”, “Why he is just looking at the pictures in the books and not reading it?!”.

Now I know: time and patience. Trust and love. No testing. I know, I know, there is nothing new here. Yet, you have to believe that they are learning, and kids have to have fun. Then one day they’ll surprise you.

So why aren’t they picking up a book and reading it?

My son still is not interested in it, even though he is reading fairly well. He prefers flipping the pages, reading an occasional word, looking at the pictures…

A.P.P. had a gazillion questions on how to encourage his son, who learned how to read at the age of 2 1/2, to actually read from a book (or how to find out if he is actually reading). Leapfrog pen, DVDs, special presentations. Eventually his boy passed that stage.  You can watch his  tiny bright little boy on YouTube reading a First Amendment to the Constitution.  Really impressive.

I think that our kids need to mature mentally and physically for certain activities. Different kids reach that stage at different times. My older son, Sunshine, also had a stage, when he could easily and loudly read any presentation with long sentences that I put together, but when it came to a real book – he would just stare at the familiar words as if he has never seen them before. I am not sure if he just didn’t like the idea of testing, pressuring him, pushing (he hates any kinds of demonstrations of his abilities), or if he didn’t actually connect them in his mind.

With Russian reading it was even worse: he would gladly read any of my presentations and get really upset every time when I show him sentences in the book.

Until recently. All of a sudden we had some weird breakthrough and he started reading any text, anywhere. I think it has to do with size of the letters: small letters required so much more attention and more effort, that it was overwhelming. I think it has to do with the character -  my Sunshine, is an energy ball who is mostly interested in physical exercise and very little – in anything that doesn’t include exhaustingly vigorous physical activity.

So, what can you do about it?

1. Relax. Get all your patience and trust and just wait… Some kids finally decide to demonstrate their reading skills at four. Some at five. Some don’t mind relieving their parent’s anxiety earlier… or wait even longer.
2. And if you can’t wait? If you just have to know?!

I am one of those parents. I have hard time with patience. Four? Five?!! Not for me. So, we’ve tried a few more tricks: you can see all the things that we’ve tried in “Alternative ways of showing the cards“. We’ve tried treasure hunts (huge hit, still doing them occasionally). We’ve tried writing (mixed results – sometimes he is into it and can’t wait to write more, sometimes he just finds it annoying). We’ve tried notes to each other on the dry-erase board: every day when he wakes up, I was writing notes for him to read, lists of what he had to do, knews about this day’s activities or playdates (major hit. He’d read TONS. After every sentence, I’d erase it and write a new one, so it looked like he didn’t have much to read afterall. Sentence after sentence, word by word, he was reading huge blocks of text without even realizing the scope of work he has accomplished!  I really liked that he is getting used to reading in different mediums – not only in my homemade books and presentations).  We’ve tried magnetic words on the fridge – awesome, we still enjoy making silly sentences for each other.  Again, it took him some time to realize, that it is the same set of words as in presentations, but eventually he just remembered them all.  The only down side – the fridge doesn’t have a live spot any more, and I think that we don’t have enough words for everything that we’d like to say!

Another thing that we’ve tried, was a collection of word cards created by A.P.P. – cards with words grouped phonetically.

We are still going through them. Love them. For some reason, they were an instant hit and helped my son figure out how the phonics work much easier. Some words he picked up along the way right from reading, some he learned from these cards. Couldn’t praise these cards more.

Word of caution: we’ve got a side effect, so judge for yourself.  As soon as we started breaking words phonetically, my son loved this so much,  that he started using his visual vocabulary a lot less, and eventually started reading phonetically even the words that he knew visually!

Another word of caution: once I started feeling too comfortable and stopped showing words/sentences/phrases presentations consistently, he… aaaah! – forgot them!  Though, recently, those words started coming back.  Besides, having a habit of learning the words visually helped him tremendously: he’d remember the names of the characters in the story right away, (or any other key words, that are repeating a lot in that text, like the word “metamorphosis” when we were reading about butterflies), and easily identify it every time he meets in a sentence – after he’d read it once-twice phonetically, he would start recognizing it visually and wouldn’t try to read it letter by letter the next time he meets it in his text.
Another wonderful gift from A.P.P.: his books.  They gave my son’s reading a tremendous push: the sentences are structured quite simply, with many repetitions of the key words, so the words “time”, “lets”, “and”, “then”, “under”, and many-many-many more he picked up from his books.  I was occasionally editing those books by separating text and pictures in different pages, but otherwise – we love them as is.

Since I didn’t have much patience, it was a long and rather difficult road for us, taking a lot of my time and creativity.  Sometimes I wish I had more of that wonderful virtue that I keep praising: patience.  My friend (not due to the excess of those qualities, but due to the lack of time), didn’t have time for all those tricks.  And… her son started reading in English AND Russian almost all by himself around the age of four and a half!!!  He is a very calm boy, who really picks up a book and slowly moves his finger from one word to the next to read every word on the page… so sometimes it is the lack of time and attention that might work better then too much energy… or, who knows, may be without all these efforts, my son would still be concentrating only on his climbing and running, without the amazing gift of reading that he is finally enjoying?  Who knows…

So, what do you think?  Why kids who are able to recognize so many words hesitate to read real books?  Why sometimes it take so much effort and sometimes happens all by itself?

Share with us your opinion and experience – it is always very helpful for all of us!