I learned to read when I was about 4.5 years old. We had spent a day somewhere quite far away from home and on the way back in the train I got bored. My dad showed me a hand-alphabet and wrote a couple of short, easy words with his hands. I was able to read those words. From that moment on it clicked.
I would read everyday, everything. Not just during those awkward elementary school days, no sir! Especially during my, in my case definitely more awkward, high school days, I turned into a quintessential bookworm. I would be the girl bumping into a lamppost because she was reading a book while walking. My good friend in high school kept me with a steady supply of both hip and new books, as well as the "classics"...in every genre imaginable. To this day, I am forever grateful to him for introducing me to Haruki Murakami, Scarlett Thomas, and, above all, Douglas Coupland (yup, his books are the reason we moved to Vancouver :-) )
For me, reading was like a spa for the mind. Utter relaxation, combined with just the right amount of escapism. Should I be in the unfortunate circumstances that there was nothing actually to read, I would resort to playing wordgames with whatever random written texts I could find, ingredients on milk bottles, streetsigns and, obviously, license plates.
However, with Jura's birth, all of that changed...slowly but surely. The first proper crack in my reading life appeared with the arrival of the last Harry Potter book. Traditionally, Menno and I would wait in line at midnight to obtain one copy of the latest book, go home and spend the next number of days bundled up in bed or on the couch until we had finished reading the book together. With the deathly hallows, however, we figured we would be foolish to think that la petite would leave us in peace long enough to get any simultaneous reading done. How right we were...
Obviously, Nori's arrival did not improve matters and now, with 3 girls and becoming a stay-at-home-mum (don't you just love that word?), my alone time has all but evaporated. Luckily technology came to my aid and with the "night" setting on my iPad, I can still catch a couple of pages before dozing off, even if the lightest-sleeping-toddler-ever is in our bed.
But, in lieu of reading myself, I now have found a pastime that is at once fulfilling, baffling and slightly more scary too...supporting my kids through their process of learning how to read! That exciting journey started when Jura was about 4,5 years old. She started to get more interested in letters and putting them together to make words, so I looked into ways to foster that interest. In Canada you start kindergarten the year that you turn five. Jura turns 5 in March, so it was a loooooong wait until she could fi-nal-ly go to school in September.
Because of the long wait, and because there is no Dutch school in Vancouver, I decided to try and find some resources to teach her to read myself. As luck woud have it, her grandpa used to be an elementary school teacher and one summer he brought some clandestine reading material to our house! Jura poured over them and enjoyed spelling the letters and turning them into words. You see, although Dutch is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, learning how to read in Dutch is a breeze! The beauty of the Dutch language lies in the fact that a lot of our letters sound exactly the same when spelled as they do in the word they are placed in. Early reading focuses strongly on words that are "pure-sounding" (so the sound of the spelled letter corresponds with the sound of that letter in the word) and this makes early reading a heck of a lot easier to do! Obviously, not all Dutch words are suited for this type of reading, so the first stories can sometimes be a bit awkward and dull.
That was exactly what Jura ran into after practising her reading for some time. The stories did not make sense to her and she got bored. She wanted to read proper stories! I consulted my Dutch online friends (of which I have plenty ;-) ) and found a great series of early-reading chapter books. Those got smuggled to Canada as well and Jura's interest in reading perked up again...but she was still not satisfied with her own skills.
In the meantime, she had started kindergarten. Now, here in Canada, kids learn how to read in kindergarten. And, as it turns out, learning to read in English is a completely different process. Because, you see, the relation between what a spelled letter sounds like and what it sound like in a word is complex...to the extent that if letter and word would ever consider counselling, it would make that counsellor very rich indeed!
To me as a non-native speaker, navigating through the English language is a treacherous ordeal. I mean, can someone please explain to me why I need to pronounce sewing machine as if it has to do something with a female pig? Or what to think of though, through and thorough? How can one "ough" sound so different? Anyway, one of my assets is that I recognize my limitations pretty well, so I left the learning-how-to-read-in-English to Jura's teacher. As any kindergartener, Jura adored her teacher and took her homework very seriously. In English, one learns to read by whole-word-recognition. You don't sound out the different letters (at least not all of them), but learn to recognize the word as a whole.
Now, the awesome thing that happened was that because Jura could already spell-and-put-together in Dutch, she was pretty good at recognizing the word, even without the omnipresent picture clues in het homereading books. But what was even sweeter, was that in her mind, the switch was flicked in her Dutch reading from spell-and-put-together to word-recognition as well! All of a sudden she realized that if she had spelled i-k (I in Dutch) once, she did not have to spell it again every time that word came up! All of a sudden, Jura's speed in reading (her biggest dissatisfaction with her own skills ;-) ) soared and she started devouring books.
Below is a picture of how we generally see Jura now. The lower half of her face seems to be permanently hidden behind a book. Her homereading books, that used to consist of 5 pages with 1 line each, are still handed in the next day for a new one. Even though nowadays, she is reading 60 pages chapter books! In the very unlikely event that there is no book in front of her, she will pause at the most inconvenient moments (think; middle of an aisle in the supermarket with 3 people trying to manoeuvre past her) with a frown on her face...reading the notion posted at the back of the shopping cart about the use of reusable bags and the benefit for the world entire. Yup, I think it is safe to say that in the past 2 years, Jura's reading habits have developed the same OCD-characteristics as my reading once had.
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